Slot machines are a game of chance. Examine the disassembled code and you can see that the supposedly random outcomes are, in fact, random.
I used to work in the industry. Sure, the odds are programmed into the machine, but if you pull a jackpot, there is nothing in the code that prevents your very next pull from being a jackpot. Now, the odds of it are very slim, but very possible.
If you could slow down time, and examine perfectly the inner state of the machine, it would be possible to pull a jackpot every time, without 'cheating', it's just the odds of this occurring in real life have been programmed in.
As an aside, most slots are programmed to pay out between 80% and 98% of the money put into them. (I think I have those figures correct, but it's been years since I've worked in the industry.) This is different depending on locale (e.g. France has laws that specify these ranges, where Nevada has only a minimum, not a maximum). This means that in certain casinos, there are winner slot machines programmed to pay out 101% of the money played over time, so if you sit at them all day, you can't lose. However, when you look at the numbers, playing 100,000 dollars over a day will only net you 1000 dollars.
I'm glad you've got the points, because this is the first intelligent response I've yet seen on the subject.
To add my two cents, Comcast's argument is with regards to Level 3 as a CDN, and how other CDNs are paying access fees.
Let's think about that for a moment... At some point an ISP like Comcast had the brilliant (if morally repugnant) idea of charging CDNs access to their customers. Since a CDN makes money off of reaching customers, their service is only valuable if they can reach the customers, which puts them in a bind. They have to pay, and the CDNs customers pay because they wish to provide their clients a better experience.
Let's look at that last one again to see how truly evil Comcast is in this scenario. Comcast has customers who pay them for net access. Instead of opening their arms to CDNs, which are a FREE way to get better service for their customers, they've decided to make CDNs pay to make service better for Comcast's customers.
This means that Comcast is introducing barriers to improving the service of their own services. Why? Because they can. I'm a locked-in Comcast customer, and I really wish I had any options.
Reading the Dr. Evil trade brings up an interesting point. When you are a majority force in the market (e.g. you own 80% of Microsoft), your trades are strictly regulated. You could perform vast amounts of traffic in an attempt to manipulate the market. Imagine you dump 20% of you 80% in order to depress the price, and then once you changed the behavior of the owners of the outstanding 20%, you start buying back stock at the depressed price. You've just taken advantage of your dominant position to manipulate the market.
In this case, however, they learned how to manipulate the majority force in the market in order to manipulate the market. They didn't have the dominant position, but they used the majority force to manipulate the market just the same. In either case, someone is intentionally manipulating the market through trades in order to take money from the rest of the market. I'm not so sure it's cut and dry...
Obviously spoken by someone who doesn't really know that much about France.
I lived for six years in France, and there is one main difference in politics between the French and Americans. When we talk about the government, we use the pronoun 'they': they can't do this, if they raise taxes, etc. For the the French, the government is 'we'. (Cue bad French jokes). I don't know why we do it [some stupid policy]. We need to do something about retirement ages.
It seems small, and so you might discount it, but this little difference is key to understanding the French. They are disgusted when voter turnout was an amazingly low (for them) 88% in the last election. We as Americans are happy if we get 50%. They've rewritten their constitution five times because they felt the situation had changed and it needed to be updated.
And as to the riots just being a national sport, that's not true. In 2006, the conservative right wing government tried to introduce a special employment contract that discriminated against the young. (Values of the French republic: Liberty. Equality. Brotherhood.) The youth held strikes, and rioted. They barricaded schools, held rallys, etc. A month later the discriminatory contract was removed from law.
As a nation, we haven't had that much national will since the civil rights movement. (Unless you count the national racism that whipped us into a fervor to support George Bush and his plans in Afghanistan^H^H^H Iraq.)
Well, as it turns out, it actually does... Take a look at the Ars Technica article on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and you'll see that SIP was modelled after HTTP. For those who don't know, SIP is the protocol most often used in making open video and voice calls over the internet (open as in non-proprietary. e.g. Skype doesn't use SIP, but interestingly enough, iChat does)
Of course, I think it's pretty obvious that it was HTTP and HTML (aka the world wide web) that brought about the huge explosion in communication and networking technology that makes voice and video over the internet possible. But I think you knew that and were just being pedantic...
7 Years ago, I moved to France to work, not speaking a word of French, and I'm now a fluent speaker. The internet was instrumental in my learning French, but maybe not in the way you might expect...
First, I used the net to search for and buy a program called Linkwords (I don't think it exists anymore, it was a crappy VB program). The software sucked, but the principle worked. It was a sort of flash card system that had you using vivid imagery as a mental aid. My vocab hit around 2000 words in the first couple of weeks. It was useless for learning to speak French, but the perfect lifesaver for reading signs, product packaging, etc.
Then, I used P2P programs to find MP3s of Pimsleur French. For those not in the know, Pimsleur was a Harvard professor in the 60s who developed a system for learning languagues that mimics the way children learn. It's all about stimulating the memory at programmed intervals and it is one of the best ways to learn to SPEAK a language. (While there is writing materiel supplements, they're relatively minimal). These are quite expensive (you can spend up to $1000 for the complete set) because they work. You need to have about 1 hour a day to devote to it, and it must be somewhere you quiet that you can listen, and speak. (You need to hear yourself speaking for it to work).
Next came my traditional phase, where I spent a lot of time reading BDs (the French equivalent of Manga. BD is Bande Dessinee (accents ommitted) which means comic strip. There's a very large adult BD culture in France). From there I progressed to Harry Potter (which is a surprisingly difficult read in French, lots of flowery speech, wordplay, etc.).
After this, my French was halting, but I constantly tried, and was always asking the meaning of words from my colleagues.
Then I started watching more French TV. At the time, the number of shows that were subtitled was depressingly dismal as compare to the US (though it has gotten a bit better). Again, computers and the net to the rescue, because I was able to download DVDs (the whole multi-language, multi-subtitle feature is a godsend for language learning). What you might not realize is that a lot of understanding a foreign language is based on context. If you know it, it's much easier to guess what is being said. In a conversation, if you miss something, you can ask the other person to repeat. Watching TV or movies requires you to pay closer attention. You can rewind, but you can never get the speaker to express the same thing using other words, so you really have to understand whats being said.
Finally, thanks to the internet, I was able to find about speed dating events in my area where I met my wife. My wife speaks English (she's an English teacher) but her family doesn't, so that got me into social situations that required me to practice speaking.
Now, I had the benefit of immersion, but I think it's important to realize that the internet is not a magic bullet for learning a foreign language, no matter what companies that sell internet based language services say. That being said, however, if the internet makes learning materiels more readily available, as well as practice opportunities, I'm all for it..
Wow, pretty cool to be on Slashdot (I work for The Open Planning Project).
With regards to open source, we try to tackle the problem from all sides. We try to create free and open standards for data, we lobby for said standards in government usage of data, and we try to supply the best of breed open source software that uses that data.
For the most part, the various governments aren't competing with each other for software, so open source makes tons of sense. In addition, the software support business model works very well for governments, because they want to keep this going, and most proprietary shops get bored with supporting a single large customer.
With regards to urban planning, our original plan was just to open up the urban planning data and see where that got us, but we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris, Bogota. Jan Gehl (one of the great moving forces behind better urban planning) basically said that since you can never satisfy all desire for cars (which make up a minority of the population anyway) it's better to scale back just a tiny bit the attention spent on cars and instead concentrate on the people. Since cars take up so much space, scaling back on cars just a small amount opens up huge possibilities for people.
And also, working for TOPP is great! We do cool things, work on open source, support great causes, and the parties are kick-ass too!
Most cache is implemented as a floating point operation? What are you talking about? Most caches are implemented as six transistors forming an SRAM cell. Using less means you don't have constant access and you have to deal with refreshing... SRAM is rather resitant to loss of power...
I'm surprised that no has yet mentioned Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms in %s" % lang series (where lang in ['c', 'c++', 'java']). It's truly the best algorithms/data structures book I've come across. (Though personally, I wish he had a Python version)
Whatever you end up doing, could I ask you to send a note about it to the people behind GothamSchools.org. It's a slightly New York-centric education blog, but they work with people around the country on improving education, and I'm sure they'd love to know about anything you end up doing.
<disclaimer>The non-profit that employs me is a parent of that organization as well.</disclaimer>
You know, I've never understood why we have one big filesystem with everything located on it anyway. Why does a user need to be able to store his files with the system binaries, or hidden in the logging directory, or in the directory for shared resources?
I think filesystems should have "slices" where different types of files live in different slices. All user files will always be in the user slice (and more specifically that user's slice) so they can never get mixed up. Within that slice, sure, they should be able to organize to their heart's content, but there's no reason to allow mixing.
Breaking the filesystem up into slices would allow for greater security as well. Think of it like chroot jails, on steroids, combined with the power of things like nosuid per-partition.
If a a user process had read only access to the executable slice, than no amount of buffer overflow would ever write code into that partition.
Downloadable executables? Put them into a sandbox slice which allows you to see what they do. No chance of some screensaver in email rifing through your bank data, etc...
Number one rule if you want the talk to go well is not to treat the kids like idiots. Don't talk down to them, even though they don't have the background to understand what you do, neither do most adults not in IT. Don't talk about technical details, but rather the ramifications.
You're company is already going to be cool, working in aerospace. Explain what it is that having computers does for your company (Something like, "We use computers to design airplanes. By connecting our computers together, one person can work on the wings, while another on the tail, and we can be sure that they'll work together. I'm the one responsible for making sure all of those computers are working. By keeping these systems up, I allow our people to better design their airplanes, and allow them to talk to the airlines to make sure there's enough space to have kids meals on your flights", etc.)
And don't forget dzone.com. Ithe the best general development resource out there, linking to blog posts and articles of alltypes, language specific, algortihms, etc...
It's an opportunity for press, "We're the first baz widget company to offer our services over IPv6".
Do something kitschy and you've got potential for viral advertising, "Got IPv6? Come see our new IPv6 only thingamabob, look it's funny, share the link with your friends".
You can garner the attention of early adopters, "You're at the forefront of technology, and so are we. That's why you should do business with Foobar Widgets."
There are plenty of business cases for IPv6, you just have to ask business experts, not technology experts...
Don't worry, it's available on the Pirate Bay. (Not trying to go around Whedon's wishes, they're working on making it available outside the US, and the official site seems to have collapsed under the strain).
There are tunnel brokers who will give you an IPv6 address now, and tell you how to create an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel and keep it up. I've got one public server already set up on IPv6 by tunnel.
Some ISPs are starting to offer native IPv6, as well. My ISP from when I lived in France, Free.fr, offers 30Mbit/2Mbit ADSL with unlimited calling to 40 odd countries with 300 odd channels for 29.99 Euros. They just added IPv6 addresses for those who request them. Makes my Optimum Online service look like the absolute crap it is...
I don't see why no one else has noticed this, but how about the XO laptop (a.k.a. the OLPC)? Besides being the same price as the kindle, (including giving one to a child in need with a $200 tax deductible donation) with a dual-mode display: one a conventional color LED laptop screen, the other a sunlight-readable, black-and-white e-book The software interface is truly incredible. The color display only uses 1 watt, and the e-book monochrome display only consumes 0.2 watts. It's rugged, has built-in wifi... It runs linux, there's python, collaborative music-making and writing...
Men working among women will either be "adopted", or suffer all out hell, and women are incredibly rough on each other in the workplace.
I'm currently living and working in France, and there are women in IT, and development, and they just do their job. Some of the "old boys" behavior is worse over here, though no one gets offended, when there's a dick who makes sexist joke, everyone just realizes they're a dick and life moves on. When I first saw desktop backgrounds, I was shocked and surprised that it didn't cause problems. But, on the mailing lists, it's as often the women sending around pictures of naked women as the men. Though, to be fair, the guys will pass on the naked male pictures (there are definitely less of them) for the benefit of the girls.
People need to get over themselves and just get on with it...
For those who can't read French, the Ubuntu forum is just a posting of a link to another forum where it was noticed. The posting, along with the interesting source can be found at http://linuxfr.org/forums/15/22562.html The interesting parts are:
The script copies the affected application's executable to one with a.bin extension, and replaces it with an suid wrapper script. This is undoable, but god, what a mess!
Okay, I couldn't overcome the lameness filter, go to the source to see for yourselves...
The FSF needs to choose its battles more wisely if it is not going to harm the people it is supposed to help.
That's ridiculous! The very people the FSF are trying to protect are the end users, not the companies who want to profit off of GNU works. All they're saying is, if you want to profit from their code, you have to follow the licenses that come with it. Using GPL software does not open you up to legal action. Creating software using someone else's code does. (Whether it's GPL or not) GPL'ed software just has the benefit of allowing you to build off of it if you decide to open up your code as well.
Wow... look at all of the Apple apologists coming out of the woodwork.
Look, I use a Macs at home, and wouldn't want to give them up (and would love to have an iPhone) but this story has already gotten ridiculous. To counter the parent as to KHTML moving to (L)GPL3: Sure, if Apple decided to fork it, they could, though they immediately lose a good portion of the benefits of open source if the rest of the developers are working on a v3 version. They have to perform all the quality control and development. And if there are "or later" clauses on the code, Apple does not have the right to remove them from the work (though new code they write doesn't have to have the "or later" clause on it.)
The FSF has a valid point here, and I don't care how much you get off with your Apple products. If they're using GPL, they have to comply with the license, and if they are going to use GPLv3 when it becomes the only license for GNU code, they'll have to open up the iPhone for development if they want to continue using it.
You can choose to believe the hype or not, as you wish, but I'm using Xen in my production environment, and it's simply fantastic. I've got friends with companies who are doing it as well, and it really changes how you think about administration.
Of course, there are some learning curves. For example, how you manage 3-7 servers is completely different from how you manage 20-30, even if they are all virtual. There's a lot more emphasis on system images, isolating functionality, reproducing configurations. On the other hand, dev environments are so much easier to build-up and tear down.
I just wish the OpenBSD port was in a usable state. The mercurial servers hosting it are often down, and even when they're up, I haven't been able to get a working kernel compiled from the sources (even after doing some of my own bugfixes). And last I saw on the Xen lists, Christoph Egger (the guy doing the OpenBSD port) submitted a security patch related to stack slamming, and the Xen guys were kind of like, "meh, security's not really a priority..."... Oh well, here's to keeping my fingers crossed
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Slot machines are a game of chance. Examine the disassembled code and you can see that the supposedly random outcomes are, in fact, random.
I used to work in the industry. Sure, the odds are programmed into the machine, but if you pull a jackpot, there is nothing in the code that prevents your very next pull from being a jackpot. Now, the odds of it are very slim, but very possible.
If you could slow down time, and examine perfectly the inner state of the machine, it would be possible to pull a jackpot every time, without 'cheating', it's just the odds of this occurring in real life have been programmed in.
As an aside, most slots are programmed to pay out between 80% and 98% of the money put into them. (I think I have those figures correct, but it's been years since I've worked in the industry.) This is different depending on locale (e.g. France has laws that specify these ranges, where Nevada has only a minimum, not a maximum). This means that in certain casinos, there are winner slot machines programmed to pay out 101% of the money played over time, so if you sit at them all day, you can't lose. However, when you look at the numbers, playing 100,000 dollars over a day will only net you 1000 dollars.
I'm glad you've got the points, because this is the first intelligent response I've yet seen on the subject.
To add my two cents, Comcast's argument is with regards to Level 3 as a CDN, and how other CDNs are paying access fees.
Let's think about that for a moment... At some point an ISP like Comcast had the brilliant (if morally repugnant) idea of charging CDNs access to their customers. Since a CDN makes money off of reaching customers, their service is only valuable if they can reach the customers, which puts them in a bind. They have to pay, and the CDNs customers pay because they wish to provide their clients a better experience.
Let's look at that last one again to see how truly evil Comcast is in this scenario. Comcast has customers who pay them for net access. Instead of opening their arms to CDNs, which are a FREE way to get better service for their customers, they've decided to make CDNs pay to make service better for Comcast's customers.
This means that Comcast is introducing barriers to improving the service of their own services. Why? Because they can. I'm a locked-in Comcast customer, and I really wish I had any options.
Reading the Dr. Evil trade brings up an interesting point. When you are a majority force in the market (e.g. you own 80% of Microsoft), your trades are strictly regulated. You could perform vast amounts of traffic in an attempt to manipulate the market. Imagine you dump 20% of you 80% in order to depress the price, and then once you changed the behavior of the owners of the outstanding 20%, you start buying back stock at the depressed price. You've just taken advantage of your dominant position to manipulate the market.
In this case, however, they learned how to manipulate the majority force in the market in order to manipulate the market. They didn't have the dominant position, but they used the majority force to manipulate the market just the same. In either case, someone is intentionally manipulating the market through trades in order to take money from the rest of the market. I'm not so sure it's cut and dry...
Obviously spoken by someone who doesn't really know that much about France.
I lived for six years in France, and there is one main difference in politics between the French and Americans. When we talk about the government, we use the pronoun 'they': they can't do this, if they raise taxes, etc. For the the French, the government is 'we'. (Cue bad French jokes). I don't know why we do it [some stupid policy]. We need to do something about retirement ages.
It seems small, and so you might discount it, but this little difference is key to understanding the French. They are disgusted when voter turnout was an amazingly low (for them) 88% in the last election. We as Americans are happy if we get 50%. They've rewritten their constitution five times because they felt the situation had changed and it needed to be updated.
And as to the riots just being a national sport, that's not true. In 2006, the conservative right wing government tried to introduce a special employment contract that discriminated against the young. (Values of the French republic: Liberty. Equality. Brotherhood.) The youth held strikes, and rioted. They barricaded schools, held rallys, etc. A month later the discriminatory contract was removed from law.
As a nation, we haven't had that much national will since the civil rights movement. (Unless you count the national racism that whipped us into a fervor to support George Bush and his plans in Afghanistan^H^H^H Iraq.)
Well, as it turns out, it actually does... Take a look at the Ars Technica article on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and you'll see that SIP was modelled after HTTP. For those who don't know, SIP is the protocol most often used in making open video and voice calls over the internet (open as in non-proprietary. e.g. Skype doesn't use SIP, but interestingly enough, iChat does)
Of course, I think it's pretty obvious that it was HTTP and HTML (aka the world wide web) that brought about the huge explosion in communication and networking technology that makes voice and video over the internet possible. But I think you knew that and were just being pedantic...
7 Years ago, I moved to France to work, not speaking a word of French, and I'm now a fluent speaker. The internet was instrumental in my learning French, but maybe not in the way you might expect...
First, I used the net to search for and buy a program called Linkwords (I don't think it exists anymore, it was a crappy VB program). The software sucked, but the principle worked. It was a sort of flash card system that had you using vivid imagery as a mental aid. My vocab hit around 2000 words in the first couple of weeks. It was useless for learning to speak French, but the perfect lifesaver for reading signs, product packaging, etc.
Then, I used P2P programs to find MP3s of Pimsleur French. For those not in the know, Pimsleur was a Harvard professor in the 60s who developed a system for learning languagues that mimics the way children learn. It's all about stimulating the memory at programmed intervals and it is one of the best ways to learn to SPEAK a language. (While there is writing materiel supplements, they're relatively minimal). These are quite expensive (you can spend up to $1000 for the complete set) because they work. You need to have about 1 hour a day to devote to it, and it must be somewhere you quiet that you can listen, and speak. (You need to hear yourself speaking for it to work).
Next came my traditional phase, where I spent a lot of time reading BDs (the French equivalent of Manga. BD is Bande Dessinee (accents ommitted) which means comic strip. There's a very large adult BD culture in France). From there I progressed to Harry Potter (which is a surprisingly difficult read in French, lots of flowery speech, wordplay, etc.).
After this, my French was halting, but I constantly tried, and was always asking the meaning of words from my colleagues.
Then I started watching more French TV. At the time, the number of shows that were subtitled was depressingly dismal as compare to the US (though it has gotten a bit better). Again, computers and the net to the rescue, because I was able to download DVDs (the whole multi-language, multi-subtitle feature is a godsend for language learning). What you might not realize is that a lot of understanding a foreign language is based on context. If you know it, it's much easier to guess what is being said. In a conversation, if you miss something, you can ask the other person to repeat. Watching TV or movies requires you to pay closer attention. You can rewind, but you can never get the speaker to express the same thing using other words, so you really have to understand whats being said.
Finally, thanks to the internet, I was able to find about speed dating events in my area where I met my wife. My wife speaks English (she's an English teacher) but her family doesn't, so that got me into social situations that required me to practice speaking.
Now, I had the benefit of immersion, but I think it's important to realize that the internet is not a magic bullet for learning a foreign language, no matter what companies that sell internet based language services say. That being said, however, if the internet makes learning materiels more readily available, as well as practice opportunities, I'm all for it..
What a great joke! You're so Wi-Di...
Forget everyday use, but on public wifi, I'm all about this!
Wow, pretty cool to be on Slashdot (I work for The Open Planning Project).
With regards to open source, we try to tackle the problem from all sides. We try to create free and open standards for data, we lobby for said standards in government usage of data, and we try to supply the best of breed open source software that uses that data.
For the most part, the various governments aren't competing with each other for software, so open source makes tons of sense. In addition, the software support business model works very well for governments, because they want to keep this going, and most proprietary shops get bored with supporting a single large customer.
With regards to urban planning, our original plan was just to open up the urban planning data and see where that got us, but we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris, Bogota. Jan Gehl (one of the great moving forces behind better urban planning) basically said that since you can never satisfy all desire for cars (which make up a minority of the population anyway) it's better to scale back just a tiny bit the attention spent on cars and instead concentrate on the people. Since cars take up so much space, scaling back on cars just a small amount opens up huge possibilities for people.
And also, working for TOPP is great! We do cool things, work on open source, support great causes, and the parties are kick-ass too!
Most cache is implemented as a floating point operation? What are you talking about? Most caches are implemented as six transistors forming an SRAM cell. Using less means you don't have constant access and you have to deal with refreshing... SRAM is rather resitant to loss of power...
If that's what you're waiting for, than you might want to have a look at this article about http://www.usaspending.gov/... It's an eye opener...
I'm surprised that no has yet mentioned Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms in %s" % lang series (where lang in ['c', 'c++', 'java']). It's truly the best algorithms/data structures book I've come across. (Though personally, I wish he had a Python version)
Whatever you end up doing, could I ask you to send a note about it to the people behind GothamSchools.org. It's a slightly New York-centric education blog, but they work with people around the country on improving education, and I'm sure they'd love to know about anything you end up doing.
<disclaimer>The non-profit that employs me is a parent of that organization as well.</disclaimer>
You know, I've never understood why we have one big filesystem with everything located on it anyway. Why does a user need to be able to store his files with the system binaries, or hidden in the logging directory, or in the directory for shared resources?
I think filesystems should have "slices" where different types of files live in different slices. All user files will always be in the user slice (and more specifically that user's slice) so they can never get mixed up. Within that slice, sure, they should be able to organize to their heart's content, but there's no reason to allow mixing.
Breaking the filesystem up into slices would allow for greater security as well. Think of it like chroot jails, on steroids, combined with the power of things like nosuid per-partition.
If a a user process had read only access to the executable slice, than no amount of buffer overflow would ever write code into that partition.
Downloadable executables? Put them into a sandbox slice which allows you to see what they do. No chance of some screensaver in email rifing through your bank data, etc...
Number one rule if you want the talk to go well is not to treat the kids like idiots. Don't talk down to them, even though they don't have the background to understand what you do, neither do most adults not in IT. Don't talk about technical details, but rather the ramifications.
You're company is already going to be cool, working in aerospace. Explain what it is that having computers does for your company (Something like, "We use computers to design airplanes. By connecting our computers together, one person can work on the wings, while another on the tail, and we can be sure that they'll work together. I'm the one responsible for making sure all of those computers are working. By keeping these systems up, I allow our people to better design their airplanes, and allow them to talk to the airlines to make sure there's enough space to have kids meals on your flights", etc.)
And don't forget dzone.com. Ithe the best general development resource out there, linking to blog posts and articles of alltypes, language specific, algortihms, etc...
There are plenty of business cases for IPv6, you just have to ask business experts, not technology experts...
Don't worry, it's available on the Pirate Bay. (Not trying to go around Whedon's wishes, they're working on making it available outside the US, and the official site seems to have collapsed under the strain).
Right now.
No, really.
There are tunnel brokers who will give you an IPv6 address now, and tell you how to create an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel and keep it up. I've got one public server already set up on IPv6 by tunnel.
Some ISPs are starting to offer native IPv6, as well. My ISP from when I lived in France, Free.fr, offers 30Mbit/2Mbit ADSL with unlimited calling to 40 odd countries with 300 odd channels for 29.99 Euros. They just added IPv6 addresses for those who request them. Makes my Optimum Online service look like the absolute crap it is...
I don't see why no one else has noticed this, but how about the XO laptop (a.k.a. the OLPC)? Besides being the same price as the kindle, (including giving one to a child in need with a $200 tax deductible donation) with a dual-mode display: one a conventional color LED laptop screen, the other a sunlight-readable, black-and-white e-book The software interface is truly incredible. The color display only uses 1 watt, and the e-book monochrome display only consumes 0.2 watts. It's rugged, has built-in wifi... It runs linux, there's python, collaborative music-making and writing...
I think this couldn't be more spot on.
Men working among women will either be "adopted", or suffer all out hell, and women are incredibly rough on each other in the workplace.
I'm currently living and working in France, and there are women in IT, and development, and they just do their job. Some of the "old boys" behavior is worse over here, though no one gets offended, when there's a dick who makes sexist joke, everyone just realizes they're a dick and life moves on. When I first saw desktop backgrounds, I was shocked and surprised that it didn't cause problems. But, on the mailing lists, it's as often the women sending around pictures of naked women as the men. Though, to be fair, the guys will pass on the naked male pictures (there are definitely less of them) for the benefit of the girls.
People need to get over themselves and just get on with it...
For those who can't read French, the Ubuntu forum is just a posting of a link to another forum where it was noticed. The posting, along with the interesting source can be found at http://linuxfr.org/forums/15/22562.html The interesting parts are:
The script copies the affected application's executable to one with a .bin extension, and replaces it with an suid wrapper script. This is undoable, but god, what a mess!
Okay, I couldn't overcome the lameness filter, go to the source to see for yourselves...
The FSF needs to choose its battles more wisely if it is not going to harm the people it is supposed to help.
That's ridiculous! The very people the FSF are trying to protect are the end users, not the companies who want to profit off of GNU works. All they're saying is, if you want to profit from their code, you have to follow the licenses that come with it. Using GPL software does not open you up to legal action. Creating software using someone else's code does. (Whether it's GPL or not) GPL'ed software just has the benefit of allowing you to build off of it if you decide to open up your code as well.
Wow... look at all of the Apple apologists coming out of the woodwork.
Look, I use a Macs at home, and wouldn't want to give them up (and would love to have an iPhone) but this story has already gotten ridiculous. To counter the parent as to KHTML moving to (L)GPL3: Sure, if Apple decided to fork it, they could, though they immediately lose a good portion of the benefits of open source if the rest of the developers are working on a v3 version. They have to perform all the quality control and development. And if there are "or later" clauses on the code, Apple does not have the right to remove them from the work (though new code they write doesn't have to have the "or later" clause on it.)
The FSF has a valid point here, and I don't care how much you get off with your Apple products. If they're using GPL, they have to comply with the license, and if they are going to use GPLv3 when it becomes the only license for GNU code, they'll have to open up the iPhone for development if they want to continue using it.
You can choose to believe the hype or not, as you wish, but I'm using Xen in my production environment, and it's simply fantastic. I've got friends with companies who are doing it as well, and it really changes how you think about administration.
Of course, there are some learning curves. For example, how you manage 3-7 servers is completely different from how you manage 20-30, even if they are all virtual. There's a lot more emphasis on system images, isolating functionality, reproducing configurations. On the other hand, dev environments are so much easier to build-up and tear down.
I just wish the OpenBSD port was in a usable state. The mercurial servers hosting it are often down, and even when they're up, I haven't been able to get a working kernel compiled from the sources (even after doing some of my own bugfixes). And last I saw on the Xen lists, Christoph Egger (the guy doing the OpenBSD port) submitted a security patch related to stack slamming, and the Xen guys were kind of like, "meh, security's not really a priority..."... Oh well, here's to keeping my fingers crossed