Regarding the speed issue, yes, right now OpenOffice does take really long to start. Now, let's use this as an example to illustrate the difference between the community model and the MS model...
OOo is scheduled for some nice optimization and speed increases in version 2.0 (and some major overhaul of the code if I'm not mistaken) Office is actually getting SLOWER with new releases - only you don't notice it because when it comes out you have a faster computer! And good luck trying to direct the development of MS Office...
Someone who would qualify for about a 60K annual income now in the US, would get between Rs.70,000 to Rs.90,000 per month in India. If you convert that, it works out to somewhere between $1500 and $2000 per month.
May not sound like much, but here in Bangalore, for example, you can rent a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment, buy a nice car and eat like a king on that salary - all after tax.
Basically, for the same skill sets, your standard of living is HIGHER in India. Oh yeah, I also forgot about the people, the REALLY CHEAP amazing food, the culture, the night life...
...if "OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours", then we are still very much in the interesting-but-not-quite-useable stage as far as computing is concerned.
Not quite sure about that. What if the costs bring it down to the point where once your OLED begins to fade, you slide out the screen and replace it with a fresh one like just another part of your comp?
Simple little script to figure out what a command does. Works on most of them. Keeps me from having to do a "man [command]" just to see what it does. It's just something I put together in a minute, so forgive me if you don't think it's done the right way - it works quite well for me. Feel free to use it if you like.
#!/bin/bash test=$1 if [ "$test" = "" ]; then echo " desc - Short for describe. Display a one line description of what a command does." echo " Usage example:" echo " desc ls" else
if [ "$test" = "desc" ];
then
echo " desc - Display a one line description of what a command does."
else
man $test | grep "$test - "
fi fi
This is an actual incident: When I worked at tech support a few years ago, a lady called me up and wanted to know why her computer cup-holder didn't work anymore.
Turns out the "cup holder" was the tray of her CDROM drive.
It's not as simple as you think. The new 2.6 kernel has certain requirements for various software packages and their versions that need to be installed before it can be compiled. Next, based on the file systems you're gonna be using, there are a whole bunch of optional packages that need to be installed. Finally, some configuration files need to be changed. It's not as simple as it looks.
..to check out the new 2.6.3 kernel considering the major changes needed to upgrade from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel if you've compiled your Linux system from source like I have.
Considering a football game and the grass/turf on the ground, the coin doesn't really get much of a chance to add much randomness due to the amount of energy absorbed - in fact, usually, it falls and lies there - hardly any bounce back. A fairer way would be to have the coin fall on a glass plate so it bounces back more, thereby inserting much more randomness into the toss.
While we're still on the subject, what about using a roulette wheel to decide? Pick red or black and let the ball decide. You can have a nice transparent glass ball (so that you can see that there's no metal inside it to bias it in any way) hitting a metal roulette wheel and glass and metal collisions have among the highest bounce co-efficients.
...like a KNOPPIX ISO image that is specifically meant for setting up a distributed computer on a local LAN. How about it? I can think of a lot of places that could use the power of distributed computing that don't necessarily have all the knowhow of how to set it up - let's take the most obvious : public schools. Something like a Flash Mob Computing KNOPPIX ISO downloadable would be like a gift from God.
I'm a guy who plays a lot online and I must say that for me, it's always more fun when there are a few girls playing - their tactics are different, their comments are different and all that contributes in a very positive way to the game - it makes the whole game so much more refreshing, just like different views make for an interesting discussion.
Part of the joy of online gaming is that your opponents can be guys or girls and you can still have a fun game. If you know the girls you're playing against, so much the better.
I mean, usually the need to separate two groups engaging in a common activity arises due to some kind of friction between the two for whatever reason.
Here, I don't see what the reason could be.
Insecurity among the guys? maybe, but why spoil the fun of the game because of a personality trait?
Embarassment? for what? getting beat by a female player? Catch up with the times already!
Sorry for putting it like this, but it has to be said - an online game is meant to be fun. So if the number of female players is increasing, I say that's a really good thing and probably the only place I'd say where it would make sense to make it girls only would be a game that's like an MMORPG version of Barbie's Dreamhouse.
True:) Though I seriously wonder how something like this will help with threats like, say, insects or rodents injected with a bio-weapon and let loose against US troops.
The system cost $45 mil. It saved $88 mil - therefore it was worth it and has already paid for itself. "The system gives immediate access to more than to 200 GB of data and nearly 8.5 million records of arrests and other incidents" - it saves time and that is a good thing.
Now Roland, the next time you write an article, think b4 you make claims like this: "Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years" - absolute rubbish. Seems more to me like a guy trying desperately to spice up his article.
As for the "falling into the wrong hands bit", well, like another poster said, you always have bad cops on the force.
So the next time anybody reading this wants to write an article, think about this : without that 16 percent claim, this would have been a good, interesting, factual article.
Very well put. Mod that comment up. This is nothing but a case of the blind leading the blind - they claim code morphing protects code n all, but the only people who will bit are those that understand very little about the technique - kinda like TV shopping.
Seems to me that stuff like this would make it quite difficult to debug once an application has been released - also, how would things like a memory dump on application crash help to debug anything here?
Can't help you out there, but I must say, nice work and a very nice idea:) If you do write such a script, please do put it on a website and submit a story to Slashdot or at the very least, message me:)
This might be a little too far fetched, but let's take the idea one step further - you can generally have a Linux distro with just about all you ever need installed on it within around 3.5GB or so. So how about a Live Linux DVD-RW distro? It stores all your data right back on the DVD.
Or have the USB pen drive companies even considered distributing a Live Linux CD with their USB pen drives? Same concept - an entire working environment anywhere you go!
Ofcourse, the latter is more realisable right now, but you have to admit, the idea of a full-blown DVD-RW live distro is interesting.
Funny you mentioned this. How about distributing Knoppix at primary schools to the parents with specific instructions about the educational games on it for their kids? Might even get some parents interested and it would certainly spread the word. Most of all, it would make the kids comfortable using Linux and they'll grow up appreciating it's stability, flexibility and the amount they can do with it. If done right, it could pretty much have a snowball effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the speed issue, yes, right now OpenOffice does take really long to start. Now, let's use this as an example to illustrate the difference between the community model and the MS model...
OOo is scheduled for some nice optimization and speed increases in version 2.0 (and some major overhaul of the code if I'm not mistaken)
Office is actually getting SLOWER with new releases - only you don't notice it because when it comes out you have a faster computer! And good luck trying to direct the development of MS Office...
Let me put it this way....
Someone who would qualify for about a 60K annual income now in the US, would get between Rs.70,000 to Rs.90,000 per month in India. If you convert that, it works out to somewhere between $1500 and $2000 per month.
May not sound like much, but here in Bangalore, for example, you can rent a beautiful 3 bedroom apartment, buy a nice car and eat like a king on that salary - all after tax.
Basically, for the same skill sets, your standard of living is HIGHER in India. Oh yeah, I also forgot about the people, the REALLY CHEAP amazing food, the culture, the night life...
...if "OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours", then we are still very much in the interesting-but-not-quite-useable stage as far as computing is concerned.
Not quite sure about that. What if the costs bring it down to the point where once your OLED begins to fade, you slide out the screen and replace it with a fresh one like just another part of your comp?
Simple little script to figure out what a command does. Works on most of them. Keeps me from having to do a "man [command]" just to see what it does. It's just something I put together in a minute, so forgive me if you don't think it's done the right way - it works quite well for me. Feel free to use it if you like.
; ;
#!/bin/bash
test=$1
if [ "$test" = "" ]
then
echo " desc - Short for describe. Display a one line description of what a command does."
echo " Usage example:"
echo " desc ls"
else
if [ "$test" = "desc" ]
then
echo " desc - Display a one line description of what a command does."
else
man $test | grep "$test - "
fi
fi
Press any key to continue
Where is the any key?
This is an actual incident:
When I worked at tech support a few years ago, a lady called me up and wanted to know why her computer cup-holder didn't work anymore.
Turns out the "cup holder" was the tray of her CDROM drive.
the other part is true too...Exchange does come from Microsoft which is... :)
It's not as simple as you think. The new 2.6 kernel has certain requirements for various software packages and their versions that need to be installed before it can be compiled. Next, based on the file systems you're gonna be using, there are a whole bunch of optional packages that need to be installed. Finally, some configuration files need to be changed. It's not as simple as it looks.
..to check out the new 2.6.3 kernel considering the major changes needed to upgrade from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel if you've compiled your Linux system from source like I have.
Considering a football game and the grass/turf on the ground, the coin doesn't really get much of a chance to add much randomness due to the amount of energy absorbed - in fact, usually, it falls and lies there - hardly any bounce back. A fairer way would be to have the coin fall on a glass plate so it bounces back more, thereby inserting much more randomness into the toss.
While we're still on the subject, what about using a roulette wheel to decide? Pick red or black and let the ball decide. You can have a nice transparent glass ball (so that you can see that there's no metal inside it to bias it in any way) hitting a metal roulette wheel and glass and metal collisions have among the highest bounce co-efficients.
...like a KNOPPIX ISO image that is specifically meant for setting up a distributed computer on a local LAN. How about it? I can think of a lot of places that could use the power of distributed computing that don't necessarily have all the knowhow of how to set it up - let's take the most obvious : public schools. Something like a Flash Mob Computing KNOPPIX ISO downloadable would be like a gift from God.
I'm a guy who plays a lot online and I must say that for me, it's always more fun when there are a few girls playing - their tactics are different, their comments are different and all that contributes in a very positive way to the game - it makes the whole game so much more refreshing, just like different views make for an interesting discussion.
Part of the joy of online gaming is that your opponents can be guys or girls and you can still have a fun game. If you know the girls you're playing against, so much the better.
I mean, usually the need to separate two groups engaging in a common activity arises due to some kind of friction between the two for whatever reason.
Here, I don't see what the reason could be.
Insecurity among the guys? maybe, but why spoil the fun of the game because of a personality trait?
Embarassment? for what? getting beat by a female player? Catch up with the times already!
Sorry for putting it like this, but it has to be said - an online game is meant to be fun. So if the number of female players is increasing, I say that's a really good thing and probably the only place I'd say where it would make sense to make it girls only would be a game that's like an MMORPG version of Barbie's Dreamhouse.
True :) Though I seriously wonder how something like this will help with threats like, say, insects or rodents injected with a bio-weapon and let loose against US troops.
Here is what makes sense:
:
The system cost $45 mil. It saved $88 mil - therefore it was worth it and has already paid for itself.
"The system gives immediate access to more than to 200 GB of data and nearly 8.5 million records of arrests and other incidents" - it saves time and that is a good thing.
Now Roland, the next time you write an article, think b4 you make claims like this
"Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years" - absolute rubbish. Seems more to me like a guy trying desperately to spice up his article.
As for the "falling into the wrong hands bit", well, like another poster said, you always have bad cops on the force.
So the next time anybody reading this wants to write an article, think about this : without that 16 percent claim, this would have been a good, interesting, factual article.
Nah, he probably uses LISP.
Very well put. Mod that comment up. This is nothing but a case of the blind leading the blind - they claim code morphing protects code n all, but the only people who will bit are those that understand very little about the technique - kinda like TV shopping.
You wouldn't happen to be a virus writer now, would you? :)
Seems to me that stuff like this would make it quite difficult to debug once an application has been released - also, how would things like a memory dump on application crash help to debug anything here?
Seems to me that they're more worried about software being cracked than being reverse engineered. Not sure how successful they'll be there.
So how about something like this then as a simple check to warn people that they may be downloading a "tampered" version of the source code?
1)
Each mirror for the source code maintains an updated list of other mirrors and also maintains an MD5 sum for the package.
2)
The configure script downloads this mirror list and selects 5 other random mirrors from which it downloads the MD5 sums of the package.
3)
It then compares the MD5 sums to that of the downloaded package - all must match to enable it to continue.
Would not this simple method make it quite difficult for someone to insert malicious code AND get it accepted at the same time?
Also check this link out: http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Home_and_Educat ion/Educational_Games/
Check out linuxforkids.org
Can't help you out there, but I must say, nice work and a very nice idea :) If you do write such a script, please do put it on a website and submit a story to Slashdot or at the very least, message me :)
This might be a little too far fetched, but let's take the idea one step further - you can generally have a Linux distro with just about all you ever need installed on it within around 3.5GB or so. So how about a Live Linux DVD-RW distro? It stores all your data right back on the DVD.
Or have the USB pen drive companies even considered distributing a Live Linux CD with their USB pen drives? Same concept - an entire working environment anywhere you go!
Ofcourse, the latter is more realisable right now, but you have to admit, the idea of a full-blown DVD-RW live distro is interesting.
Funny you mentioned this. How about distributing Knoppix at primary schools to the parents with specific instructions about the educational games on it for their kids? Might even get some parents interested and it would certainly spread the word. Most of all, it would make the kids comfortable using Linux and they'll grow up appreciating it's stability, flexibility and the amount they can do with it. If done right, it could pretty much have a snowball effect.