I find that from my Bonn based DSL hookup, T-Online does not _block_ SMTP; instead, it redirects it through their own SMTP server that replaces my sender address with my T-Online address. This is not so nice when using multiple accounts, so I signed up for their SMTP relay, using it as smart relay host with Sendmail. It works like a breeze for me.
Would it be technically possible to write a program that takes source code as input and heavily modifies it (i.e. renaming of identifiers, restructuring of source, restructuring of call order (should be possible for given languages using a virtual-machine concept), insertion of loops, heavy optimizations and so on) so that the result has no similarity with the original?
It would be interesting to put it under the GPL (for the self-referentiality...) and use it to modify GPL's source code so that effectively, it's GPL'd-ness could no longer be proven or even ascertained:-)
Then one could create legally interesting situations.
your foreign policy is also tainted by self-interest. This is why America was recently shunned by the UN members...
The fact that the US delegate was ousted from the Human Rights council may have something to do with the fact that under the rule of the current US president as governor in Texas, more death sentences were issued there every year than in Iran. (In Iran officially, that is, of course.) As far as the replacement with countries like Sudan (which has a civil war, is the poorest nation on Earth and has a very poor human rights record either) is probably symbolic, seeing the exposed role that the US have and that the US government every now and then admits to having and enforces; it's probably something like if you insist to behave like the world's police force, better make sure that you're morally qualified to do it...
The rest of the world knows it. They realize that your government is are smiling, palm-pushing shills for your industries - and the AMERICAN PEOPLE let it continue. Im sorry - this appears to be flamebait - but if some NON-Americans can please 'back-me-up' here Id appreciate it.
I am rather sure a large percentage of Slashdot readers is not going to like this, but being a non-American, I can only say that this is indeed what an unsettlingly large number of people over here think; I've talked mainly to Germans, some Sudanese, one from England and four from Central Asia, and they'd all agree with you: that the current US government is acting rather imperialistically, mainly in the interest of the US industry and cares for little else.
Kyoto was scuttled. The farce that is the 'energy crisis' is being sold to hood-wink the public. The 'resurrection' of the cold-war for the purposes of giving gifts to the military-industrial industry... The result of obvious cow-towing to business is really just beginning to show. The media outlets dump propaganda on the people like no tomorrow (and shore up the initiatives mentioned above). The American Public looks really foolish considering the crap they ingest. Look at Bush.. The guy is a literally a moron - and he's your president!
Outside America, we notice a growing anti-Americanism at the moment which is due, of course, to current US politics. This is not good - in Germany where I come from, much of our current wealth is based on US funding (after the more or less destruction of the country during the war) and US protection during the first decades of the Iron Curtain, and other countries on this planet used to owe the US as well. At the moment, however, there is a growing notion of "It's US, so it's bad, morally insufficient and new-economy-style imperialism". It's probably the US's turn at the moment to convince us that this image is not justified.
PS: This is probably going to be moderated to flamebait, but that's probably the price of being outspoken in a forum with a large US majority in the readership...
As far as the "endangering your karma" bit is concerned, well, there definitely are things that need to be said, even though people don't like them.
Your point is completely right. In a world where something like half of the world's population can't read or write and where millions of people each year die either of starvation or in wars, a portable cheap computer is definitely not the thing to solve these people's trouble. I talked to a friend from Sudan about this and he laughed at me in the face outright. This is not helpful. A lot of money is going to be wasted.
If you take a look at this history of cellphones in Germany (which is in German, of course, but the fish should help), you'll learn that the first mobile phone service (the "A-Netz" or A network) was instantiated in Germany in 1958 (mainly in cars, and it was not public), while the first "cellular" network, the "B-Netz" (B network, respectively) entered service in 1972, was internationally available (i.e. you could use your not-so-mobile device in Austria, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and had most characteristics of modern cellphone networks in terms of usage: you had a phone that had a number assigned and with which you could dial out, and all from a network that was organized in cells. It had about 16,000 users because the devices were rather expensive:-)
"Modern" analog cellphone service as we know it was instantiated with the "C-Netz" in 1985 (no, I'm not translating it this time) which was the first "popular" network to gain large scale popularity and allowed data transfer as well. GSM networking started with the "D-Netz" (which is what we're using now) in 1992.
The whole issue of the Romans and Greeks employing industrial technology is largely a myth, I'm afraid.
For example, you quote Gibbon who is not only very early but also very creative in his interpretation of the sources; with ancient literary sources one has to be a little careful with what they depict, because you can also interpret the giant bird that the Arabian Nights speak of as the Rukh as a helicopter if you insist and so on. It is known that Archimedes was a bright little fellow, so to speak, and that he definitely used technology that was not seen before or afterwards in order to defend Syracuse, but it was destroyed during the siege, and Archimedes was killed, so we know nothing of what it actually was. The Greeks and their steam power use are poorly documented. The only relatively certain application of steam power (for which we have a reliable source) was a steam turbine consisting of a metal ball with two exhaust pipes that would rotate when heated; it was built by one Heron of Alexandria, but it appears to have been more of a scholar's toy than of an industrial application. I'd be grateful to have either a modern scientific reference or an ancient source for that story about Hadrian and the Greeks.
The key to understanding why the Greeks (and Romans) did not employ this type of technology on a large scale is probably their mindset; a steam engine was a philosopher's toy, but it had no practical value and was not regarded as something applicable in the real world; it's a bit like building giant observatories to observe the skies for astrological purposes. The Romans had an economy capable of generating surpluses (not surplus; it has been shown by Polanyi in 1957 that the economy as such has no susplus), but they did not have banking capable of large-scale investments, shared loans or shares, no insurance (except the "sea loans" the Greeks employed) and very little money transfer without actually transfering cash; there was some giro transfer between granaries in Ptolemaic Egypt, but it was too impractical and did not extend beyond a very limited geographic range. Most of these infrastructural requirements for industrialization were instantiated by Arabic or Jewish traders in the sixth to tenth century, and the necessary mindset evolved in Europe after Averroes and Thomas of Aquin, i.e. in thhe twelfth to thirteenth century. The ancient civilizations (in Europe, that is) might have had some technological toys, but they did not have technology in such a way that they did anything useful with it.
Moderation for scientific publications makes little sense for two reasons:
Most journals actually accept or reject articles sent to them based on their scientific content. That's why most journals are actually edited by expert scientists in the field - in order to guarantee that the scientific content is worthwhile. Since the fields a journal publishes in are usually rather narrow in most sciences, this actually works quite well.
Still, there is the occasional article which has scientific value that the editor does not recognize, for example if it is a "revolutionary" article or one that focuses on subjects of dispute. Public moderation would not solve this, however. Take a look at the moderation on Slashdot, for example: it does not judge the content of comments based on whether they're true or justified, but based on whether someone thinks they're worth reading, which is much more a matter of personal taste. In general, a large set of persons with varying expertise in a field is less likely to democratically judge so that the results are appropriate than a small set of editors with much expertise in the field. The reason for using Slashdot moderation is the avoidance of trolls (sorry, couldn't resist), a danger which is not or hardly not present in scientific publications.
Apart from that, the problem of a lot of garbage getting published is not due to the pressure on the publishers and has little to do, hence, with the financial situation we are talking about. It is a more general problem in heavily paradigmatic sciences where a person's scientific productivity and, ultimately, "value" is based on the sheer number of their publications. Very little authors have the honesty and/or courage to publish, say, a result like "We did this and this experiment, but the results actually show that the investigated theory has little scientific significance."; instead, the pressure to publish forces them to inflate their results, leading to the well-known jokes about scientific jargon.
Except that you can't get work done with it
on
PDAs, PDAs
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· Score: 1
While the operating system may be "fully Unicode", that doesn't mean you could buy any device that uses it, let alone use any word processor on EPOC that supports it. Windows NT 4 has been fully Unicode for about five years, but you still couldn't use it because there was no application software that supported it. I'm not interested in what the operating system vendors claim, but what remains in useable devices that I can get work done with.
BTW I am far from certain that any keyboard PDA with EPOC ER6 will even come out, seeing the difficult stand that Symbian now has.
Question about Keyboard PDAs w/Unicode
on
PDAs, PDAs
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· Score: 1
Myself, I'd use a pocket computer mainly for use in libraries, since I'm a scientist and in the library it's a real pain in the rear that you have to lock up your notebook in the reading room because it's too clumsy to carry around and you I want it stolen. So I need a pocket device that I can carry around comfortably with which I can type text comfortably as well, which rules out most pen-type ("pocket pc"-esque) PDAs.
Since I'm in Islamic studies, I make extensive use of non-Roman characters, including Arabic as well as Roman transcription for Arabic. Hence, I need a PDA that supports Unicode as well, and in a useable version (i.e. with a unicode-based word processor, which rules out EPOC and PalmOS)
The only pocket OS that does Unicode fairly well and is in the market already is Windows CE, I'm ashamed to say, and the only CE PDA with a keyboard is the $800 HP Jornada 700 series (the older 680 and 690 as well), all of which are damn expensive.
So, does anyone know of another keyboard PDA with an operating system that supports Unicode that is either available already or under development? Will the pocket versions of Linux support Unicode? (The Qt-based developments should, I think.) Has anyone ever used Unicode on a PDA? I'd be really interested.
Note that this changes very little about the existing situation in most European countries, since the EU law merely unifies the laws present in the European countries at the moment.
More information about this is on the Heise news ticker, with special information regarding the situation in Germany. As always, Heise posts this in German, so those of you who participate in the English monoculture have to use the Fish or something similar.
The article on Heise specifically points out that in Germany, the situation doesn't change at all with the new law, more or less, and especially that napstering music is not becoming illegal, but that it never was legal for other than private purposes in Germany. Which is where they're right.
I've worked on research projects whose primary source was day-to-day accounting records of a small business running in Egypt during the 11th century.
Yes, but we don't need the records of every small business in every country in every century. Just some sampling will do. We lose information but it's a tradeoff for space and conservation work. The same about modern data.
You evidently have very little experience with historical work. Anywhere there was a "tradeoff" in the past historians nowadays curse those who were responsible. Data is invaluable. Reconstruction based on samples is worth very little when compared to reconstruction based on actual data.
I'm working on the reconstruction of trade patterns on the Silk Read myself at the moment, and my primary source is the diary of an Armenian merchant who travelled from Isfahan to Lhasa in the late 17th century. All his bookkeeping and records are in the diary. It's one of the best sources there are for the period. Shame if it had bee lost due to not being able to read his Macintosh 400 kB GCR disks any longer:-)
BTW I'd be grateful if you could contact me and give me some details about the Egypt-related project you were working on.
Given the pain in the ass that reading clay tablets is at the moment (since our command of Sumerian is limited, our command of Hittite is even more limited, and our command of Eblaite is heavily dependent on our already-limited command of Sumerian, the only clay tablet language we can read fairly well is Akkadian, and even this is not fun), I honestly don't want to find myself in the position to have to read some ancient 400kB Mac GCR disks with Nisus Writer 1.0 files with text in Ethiopian on them.
Only the most xenophobic people on earth could have come up with the Great Wall of China. China has always shunned the outside world, even when the ideas from the outside world would better their society. That is why the nation that 1000 years ago was the greatest nation on earth no longer is the greatest nation on earth. They cannot learn from the outside world.
China would do the same if it had the technical capabilities to do so.
Some corrections are in order, I think.
The Great Wall was built mainly because China had a history of being invaded by nomadic people from the north, such as the Xiongnu, the Xianbi, the Mongols and finally the Manchus. It had little to do with xenophobia, rather with territorial defense.
China hasn't always shunned the outside world. They started to shun it on a large scale after 1368 when the (foreign) Yuan dynasty was overthrown and the Ming dynasty embraced an ideology of nationalism.
It's not exactly true that they cannot learn from the outside world. If I remember correctly. the fighter that was wrecked during the incident was a J-5, which is a clone of the Russian MiG-17 (and dispensable).:-)
A nation that has a space programme is probably able to send a reengineered transport plane close to another country. It'd be really revealing to see how the US would react:-)
You're not quite right about Genghis Khan. He was not Chinese but Mongol, and he actually conquered China in the early 13th century, establishing the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368 when it was replaced by the Ming. The Chinese were sort of used to being invaded from the north every now and then since about 200 BC.
In spite of having been able to invade and conquer quite a number of surrounding countries in the past, the Chinese have never been as territorially expansionistic as some other countries. They usually resorted to controlling the surrounding states' governments (which is a bit like the US activity in Middle and South America or in countries like Kuwait where there is a strong US presence) and sometimes forcing them to pay tributes (which, again, is something practically everybody does). At the moment, China is in the borders of the Qing dynasty (which, again, consisted of Manchus, not Chinese, and ended in 1911), excluding Taiwan (where they claim terratory) and Mongolia (which they wouldn't probably want because there's nothing there). The other 13 territorial disputes are fairly minor, at least compared to other superpowers, and the scale of foreign intervention that the Chinese currently engage in is below the US amount by several orders of magnitude.
As far as the "barbarians" or "foreign devils" are concerned, that dates back to the period of Yuan rule where China (which has a 3000-year history of civilization) was ruled by horse-riding "barbarians" from the north. The term had a point since then. However, this attitude is so common everywhere in the world that I have serious trouble blaming the Chinese specifically for it. My own country's history is so filled up with it, and so is the US's, that we shouldn't really get down to such a primitive level of comparison.
Being neither US nor Chinese, I think most of you US citizens are being a bit hypocritical about the whole affair at the moment. It seems that China is slowly replacing Russia as "enemy #1" in most of your heads, which is a pity because you probably don't know that much about either country's history beyond the CIA World Factbook.
Is it just me or is there no real innovation in this piece of hardware?
All it says is "Get yourself a server in whatever shape you like! Simply ummage through your old hardware, get components for one computer, build yourself a case in the desired shape, and install Linux". Of course, this is a recipe for a 100% customized server running Linux, but it's not really the innovation of the century.
Seeing that they even left out the interesting parts, such as the software for the LC display, I'm sort of disappointed. I'm running a custom FreeBSD server in a custom case myself, now should I post it everywhere for geeks to look at?
I didn't know about the CompactFlash IDE hacks, though. Seeing the current prices for CompactFlash cards, however, this is not an option either.
You just don't know how good your state really is. In Germany, DSL became available in numbers only a couple of months ago. In Britain, it's still a pain in the ass to try and get it. In Russia or China, as long as you aren't in one of the main cities and pay a hell of a lot of money for it, you won't get it. In Sudan where I spent some time working now, you pay about $1000 per year for good old modem access.
Who cares if the next window for Pluto exploration with late-20th-century technology opens up in 2300? In a couple of decades, we'll be able to travel through space with proper drives anyway, and by 2100 we can probably just send a manned exploration craft to Pluto and back again in no time. The planet isn't that interesting, so the data can probably wait till then.
I fail to see the flamebait in this; practically anyone in Europe who has ever ordered something from across the ocean is used to either unavailability or age-long delays.
I thought they had just finished the PS II and were now planning for the PS III?
Have I missed something? Are they developing the PS XII already? If it's really PS X compatible, however, then I absolutely need it. What's the point in buying a PS XI, however?
He was moderated to "Troll" because the moderation system is not based on whether something is true or justified. The moderation system is based on the personal mood and taste of the moderators. If moderator X likes an article, then he mods it up. If it's rhetorically capturing in any way or looks interesting or expresses his thought at the moment, he mods it up. If not, he mods it down. As easy as that.
A lot of people are not going to like this, and consequently this is going to get modded down quite a lot, but when Goebbels held his speech on Total War on February 18, 1943, tens of thousands of people frantically screamed "YES" at his question whether they wanted "total war, more total and radical than they could even imagine" not because it was true (in the end, they did not really like it as it came) or justified (you can't justify war, let alone total war), but because they liked the way he said it, because they were bewitched by his rhetorics. I'm not comparing Slashdot with Nazi Germany, but the mechanism is still the same.
To get it down to an easy bottom line: It does not matter what you are saying, it only counts how you say it.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that from my Bonn based DSL hookup, T-Online does not _block_ SMTP; instead, it redirects it through their own SMTP server that replaces my sender address with my T-Online address. This is not so nice when using multiple accounts, so I signed up for their SMTP relay, using it as smart relay host with Sendmail. It works like a breeze for me.
It would be interesting to put it under the GPL (for the self-referentiality...) and use it to modify GPL's source code so that effectively, it's GPL'd-ness could no longer be proven or even ascertained :-)
Then one could create legally interesting situations.
The fact that the US delegate was ousted from the Human Rights council may have something to do with the fact that under the rule of the current US president as governor in Texas, more death sentences were issued there every year than in Iran. (In Iran officially, that is, of course.) As far as the replacement with countries like Sudan (which has a civil war, is the poorest nation on Earth and has a very poor human rights record either) is probably symbolic, seeing the exposed role that the US have and that the US government every now and then admits to having and enforces; it's probably something like if you insist to behave like the world's police force, better make sure that you're morally qualified to do it...
I am rather sure a large percentage of Slashdot readers is not going to like this, but being a non-American, I can only say that this is indeed what an unsettlingly large number of people over here think; I've talked mainly to Germans, some Sudanese, one from England and four from Central Asia, and they'd all agree with you: that the current US government is acting rather imperialistically, mainly in the interest of the US industry and cares for little else.
Outside America, we notice a growing anti-Americanism at the moment which is due, of course, to current US politics. This is not good - in Germany where I come from, much of our current wealth is based on US funding (after the more or less destruction of the country during the war) and US protection during the first decades of the Iron Curtain, and other countries on this planet used to owe the US as well. At the moment, however, there is a growing notion of "It's US, so it's bad, morally insufficient and new-economy-style imperialism". It's probably the US's turn at the moment to convince us that this image is not justified.
PS: This is probably going to be moderated to flamebait, but that's probably the price of being outspoken in a forum with a large US majority in the readership...
Your point is completely right. In a world where something like half of the world's population can't read or write and where millions of people each year die either of starvation or in wars, a portable cheap computer is definitely not the thing to solve these people's trouble. I talked to a friend from Sudan about this and he laughed at me in the face outright. This is not helpful. A lot of money is going to be wasted.
"Modern" analog cellphone service as we know it was instantiated with the "C-Netz" in 1985 (no, I'm not translating it this time) which was the first "popular" network to gain large scale popularity and allowed data transfer as well. GSM networking started with the "D-Netz" (which is what we're using now) in 1992.
For example, you quote Gibbon who is not only very early but also very creative in his interpretation of the sources; with ancient literary sources one has to be a little careful with what they depict, because you can also interpret the giant bird that the Arabian Nights speak of as the Rukh as a helicopter if you insist and so on. It is known that Archimedes was a bright little fellow, so to speak, and that he definitely used technology that was not seen before or afterwards in order to defend Syracuse, but it was destroyed during the siege, and Archimedes was killed, so we know nothing of what it actually was. The Greeks and their steam power use are poorly documented. The only relatively certain application of steam power (for which we have a reliable source) was a steam turbine consisting of a metal ball with two exhaust pipes that would rotate when heated; it was built by one Heron of Alexandria, but it appears to have been more of a scholar's toy than of an industrial application. I'd be grateful to have either a modern scientific reference or an ancient source for that story about Hadrian and the Greeks.
The key to understanding why the Greeks (and Romans) did not employ this type of technology on a large scale is probably their mindset; a steam engine was a philosopher's toy, but it had no practical value and was not regarded as something applicable in the real world; it's a bit like building giant observatories to observe the skies for astrological purposes. The Romans had an economy capable of generating surpluses (not surplus; it has been shown by Polanyi in 1957 that the economy as such has no susplus), but they did not have banking capable of large-scale investments, shared loans or shares, no insurance (except the "sea loans" the Greeks employed) and very little money transfer without actually transfering cash; there was some giro transfer between granaries in Ptolemaic Egypt, but it was too impractical and did not extend beyond a very limited geographic range. Most of these infrastructural requirements for industrialization were instantiated by Arabic or Jewish traders in the sixth to tenth century, and the necessary mindset evolved in Europe after Averroes and Thomas of Aquin, i.e. in thhe twelfth to thirteenth century. The ancient civilizations (in Europe, that is) might have had some technological toys, but they did not have technology in such a way that they did anything useful with it.
- Most journals actually accept or reject articles sent to them based on their scientific content. That's why most journals are actually edited by expert scientists in the field - in order to guarantee that the scientific content is worthwhile. Since the fields a journal publishes in are usually rather narrow in most sciences, this actually works quite well.
- Still, there is the occasional article which has scientific value that the editor does not recognize, for example if it is a "revolutionary" article or one that focuses on subjects of dispute. Public moderation would not solve this, however. Take a look at the moderation on Slashdot, for example: it does not judge the content of comments based on whether they're true or justified, but based on whether someone thinks they're worth reading, which is much more a matter of personal taste. In general, a large set of persons with varying expertise in a field is less likely to democratically judge so that the results are appropriate than a small set of editors with much expertise in the field. The reason for using Slashdot moderation is the avoidance of trolls (sorry, couldn't resist), a danger which is not or hardly not present in scientific publications.
Apart from that, the problem of a lot of garbage getting published is not due to the pressure on the publishers and has little to do, hence, with the financial situation we are talking about. It is a more general problem in heavily paradigmatic sciences where a person's scientific productivity and, ultimately, "value" is based on the sheer number of their publications. Very little authors have the honesty and/or courage to publish, say, a result like "We did this and this experiment, but the results actually show that the investigated theory has little scientific significance."; instead, the pressure to publish forces them to inflate their results, leading to the well-known jokes about scientific jargon.BTW I am far from certain that any keyboard PDA with EPOC ER6 will even come out, seeing the difficult stand that Symbian now has.
Since I'm in Islamic studies, I make extensive use of non-Roman characters, including Arabic as well as Roman transcription for Arabic. Hence, I need a PDA that supports Unicode as well, and in a useable version (i.e. with a unicode-based word processor, which rules out EPOC and PalmOS)
The only pocket OS that does Unicode fairly well and is in the market already is Windows CE, I'm ashamed to say, and the only CE PDA with a keyboard is the $800 HP Jornada 700 series (the older 680 and 690 as well), all of which are damn expensive.
So, does anyone know of another keyboard PDA with an operating system that supports Unicode that is either available already or under development? Will the pocket versions of Linux support Unicode? (The Qt-based developments should, I think.) Has anyone ever used Unicode on a PDA? I'd be really interested.
More information about this is on the Heise news ticker, with special information regarding the situation in Germany. As always, Heise posts this in German, so those of you who participate in the English monoculture have to use the Fish or something similar.
The article on Heise specifically points out that in Germany, the situation doesn't change at all with the new law, more or less, and especially that napstering music is not becoming illegal, but that it never was legal for other than private purposes in Germany. Which is where they're right.
I hope your lpr is not connected over the network, otherwise you'll have a nasty recursion problem and will run out of paper eventually.
Yes, but we don't need the records of every small business in every country in every century. Just some sampling will do. We lose information but it's a tradeoff for space and conservation work. The same about modern data.
You evidently have very little experience with historical work. Anywhere there was a "tradeoff" in the past historians nowadays curse those who were responsible. Data is invaluable. Reconstruction based on samples is worth very little when compared to reconstruction based on actual data.
BTW I'd be grateful if you could contact me and give me some details about the Egypt-related project you were working on.
Given the pain in the ass that reading clay tablets is at the moment (since our command of Sumerian is limited, our command of Hittite is even more limited, and our command of Eblaite is heavily dependent on our already-limited command of Sumerian, the only clay tablet language we can read fairly well is Akkadian, and even this is not fun), I honestly don't want to find myself in the position to have to read some ancient 400kB Mac GCR disks with Nisus Writer 1.0 files with text in Ethiopian on them.
Are the US concerned about world safety? Or is it rather US safety, paired with corporate interests? I honestly don't know.
Someone once said "Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen" or "Vive la France et mort aux autres" as well :-)
China would do the same if it had the technical capabilities to do so. Some corrections are in order, I think.
In spite of having been able to invade and conquer quite a number of surrounding countries in the past, the Chinese have never been as territorially expansionistic as some other countries. They usually resorted to controlling the surrounding states' governments (which is a bit like the US activity in Middle and South America or in countries like Kuwait where there is a strong US presence) and sometimes forcing them to pay tributes (which, again, is something practically everybody does). At the moment, China is in the borders of the Qing dynasty (which, again, consisted of Manchus, not Chinese, and ended in 1911), excluding Taiwan (where they claim terratory) and Mongolia (which they wouldn't probably want because there's nothing there). The other 13 territorial disputes are fairly minor, at least compared to other superpowers, and the scale of foreign intervention that the Chinese currently engage in is below the US amount by several orders of magnitude.
As far as the "barbarians" or "foreign devils" are concerned, that dates back to the period of Yuan rule where China (which has a 3000-year history of civilization) was ruled by horse-riding "barbarians" from the north. The term had a point since then. However, this attitude is so common everywhere in the world that I have serious trouble blaming the Chinese specifically for it. My own country's history is so filled up with it, and so is the US's, that we shouldn't really get down to such a primitive level of comparison.
Being neither US nor Chinese, I think most of you US citizens are being a bit hypocritical about the whole affair at the moment. It seems that China is slowly replacing Russia as "enemy #1" in most of your heads, which is a pity because you probably don't know that much about either country's history beyond the CIA World Factbook.
All it says is "Get yourself a server in whatever shape you like! Simply ummage through your old hardware, get components for one computer, build yourself a case in the desired shape, and install Linux". Of course, this is a recipe for a 100% customized server running Linux, but it's not really the innovation of the century.
Seeing that they even left out the interesting parts, such as the software for the LC display, I'm sort of disappointed. I'm running a custom FreeBSD server in a custom case myself, now should I post it everywhere for geeks to look at?
I didn't know about the CompactFlash IDE hacks, though. Seeing the current prices for CompactFlash cards, however, this is not an option either.
Summary: So What?
Recognize your own luxury when you see it.
Who cares if the next window for Pluto exploration with late-20th-century technology opens up in 2300? In a couple of decades, we'll be able to travel through space with proper drives anyway, and by 2100 we can probably just send a manned exploration craft to Pluto and back again in no time. The planet isn't that interesting, so the data can probably wait till then.
I fail to see the flamebait in this; practically anyone in Europe who has ever ordered something from across the ocean is used to either unavailability or age-long delays.
There is a game called CowboyNeal in the list, and its voting page points to goatse.cx in one of the links.
Have I missed something? Are they developing the PS XII already? If it's really PS X compatible, however, then I absolutely need it. What's the point in buying a PS XI, however?
A lot of people are not going to like this, and consequently this is going to get modded down quite a lot, but when Goebbels held his speech on Total War on February 18, 1943, tens of thousands of people frantically screamed "YES" at his question whether they wanted "total war, more total and radical than they could even imagine" not because it was true (in the end, they did not really like it as it came) or justified (you can't justify war, let alone total war), but because they liked the way he said it, because they were bewitched by his rhetorics. I'm not comparing Slashdot with Nazi Germany, but the mechanism is still the same.
To get it down to an easy bottom line: It does not matter what you are saying, it only counts how you say it.