I don't know about y'all but personally I think that buying music online @ 128kbs is a rip-off.
My reasining being (based on totally personal views and observations): you download music @ 128kbs and you are aware it's not an excellent quality, but "quite good enough".
Now, if I were to buy the music online I would excect at least the same quality I get on CD; so let's say, a 256kbs or more MP3 would be reasonable. And it would be reasonable for me to do the same thing with that music as I do with my CDs: (re)encode the to OGG, put them on my computer/stereo/car player/portable player/take them to a (private) party with me... If I paid for it, I'll make damn sure others are not getting it for free.
Please note: I am not aware of any of the sites selling music that offer this kind of service, so don't pls don't rampage about that.
German Layout: There's a really old one for the Mac: Doesn't work for me (PC user) or any MacX user
Norwegian, Swedish: links time out.
Japanese & Spanish: this seem ok.
But the fact is, that still most of the world doesn't speak these languages. I dare you: find Dvorak keyboards layouts for slavic (polish, slovenian, russian, slovak, croatian, czech, serbian, romanian...) languages, chinese, thai, greek, portugese,... My additional requirement is that they are supported by most modern systems (Linux, W2k+, MacX).
You'll have trouble finding them because they don't exist or if they do they can be installed on only very narrow set of OSes.
My point being: the Dvorak layout has been designed for the US layouts only.:-/
What about people who don't speak English?
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> So let's use a keyboard designed for people, not machines, shall we?
Funny, haven't seen a Dvorak keyboard yet designed for non-English speaking people (read: no international characters!)
What if electricity goes out? Then your LCD-hanging-everywhere-house will be without any pictures and mine plain-printed-photographs-house will still have everything on the walls.
Even worse - think about your pictures getting a virus and flushing everything into a black hole.
RHEL ES has two versions, priced at $350 and $800, depending on the support level. W2K3 SBS (Small Business Server) is available at different prices from different vendors, but is typically around $500. All prices in US dollars. The prices are quite similar. If you need support for more than installation and basic configuration, Windows 2003 is actually cheaper.
I don't know which page you were looking at, but Microsoft says that the cheapest W2K3 SBS is $599 (not counting upgrades). And that's only for 5 named users! Add 20 users ($776) and you come to a hefty sum of $1375! And that's the SBS Standard edition (without the SQL, ISA and FP server). Additional restrictions also apply.
So, $500 is really a bit of an understatement. (To be fair, I haven't checked what you get with RH for $350 or $800).
No corporation is Evil (TM) or Good (TM). They are simply seeking Profit (TM).
Why is Microsoft giving the cheapest licences to people not running any Linux? Because it's the way to sell most of their software.
Why is Cisco helping build the Big Firewall of China? Because it brings them a lot of profit.
Why is Google such a nice company? Because, by playing nice, they appeal to a lot of people and attract customers and this means profit.
So, like it or not - profit is the key.
For example, if M$ would BELIVE (this is the key factor) they would make more money by - for example - completely opensourcing WinXP and just selling consulting and training, they would do it in a pinch and everybody would go like "Ohh, look at M$, they are so good (TM)!"
Something I remember from high-school: We had to prove that every prime, except for 1,2 and 3 takes the form:
(6k+1) or (6k-1) We have proven the point.
So, all primes > 3 are subset of this group.
If you extend this to be a bit more abstract, you come to the conclusion:
If you number all primes from 1 on with p1...pn and your last found prime with pk, than you can safely say that all following primes *MUST* be a subgroup of:
p[1]*p[2]*...*p[k] +/- (p[1],p[2],...,p[k-1])
This is somewhere between the array and brute force method described in the article because you increase the step as you go and the multiplier can be just multiplied with the last found prime in each iteration. The downside being, that you still need to check if the number is prime by deviding it with all prime number found so far which are less than sqrt(n).
Come on... it's sunday evening... and i'm at work... and been working for some time now... and my brain doesn't move the fingers in the way it is supposed to...
Than what have I been studying for the last 4 years?
Seriouslly: Economics *IS* a science. The only problem lies in the fact, that it is more of a social science (like sociology, philosophy) than a fact-based science (mathemathics, physics...). Saying economics is not a science is like saying pyhiatry is not a science.
Economics is a science that tries to determine how people will act based on the previous emphirical data. That's why you'll get 7 different answers if you ask 7 different economists for a forcast.
Re:I'm with linus torvalds on this one
on
Browser Wars Mark II
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> They are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
I know that most of the/. crowd thinks that flash bloats the interface, but I happen to work for a web development company that has quite a few designers experienced with Flash. IMHO a good Flash interface can enrichen the whole experience and not be used just for banners.
For example, A lot of car sites use flash for presentation and it works wonders.
Check out, for example the new minisite for Peugeot 407 (click the view animation). It's not the best example, but try doing that in HTML 3.0. I'd post a few links to our sites, but don't like the idea of being slasdotted.
... some HTML here blah blah blah... <iframe src="http://some-other-subdomain.mymailserver.com/ ?id=some_very_long_and_ungessable_message_id&u ser=some_long_and_ungessable_userid&hash=some_ long_and_ungessable_hash"/> ... some HTML here blah blah blah...
This should IMHO work in any newer browser and will stop any script attack.
I don't know about US, but in Slovenia (and I think EU, also), beer *is* food, along with wine.
Where do I get this information from? There are only two VAT rates in EU: the low one for food and similar and the high one for everything else. Beer and wine are in the "food VAT section". Generally speaking, since the alchohol level is less than 20 it is still considered food (so, strong drinks - Whiskey & co. - are not).
Finally, it is quite normal to drink a glass or two of wine / beer with your meal while drinking a glass or two of Scotch is certanly not:-)
How bout bringing our teachers to this century 1st
on
Hands on Science Learning
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd be more than happy if some of my teachers started using methods that are not 30 years old, for starters:)
I don't know about you guys, but in my part of the country you always have at least one keyboard layout installed (for your locale), in most cases two (yours and English).
I can tell you for a fact, that all people using 'alternative' (as in non-ASCII) character sets always have two locales installed.
For example, in Serbia, both character sets are used - cyrillic and latin. So, to type in www.microsoft.com with cyrillic c (by the way, 'c' is 's' in cyrillic) and o, one would have to:
1. Type www.mi 2. Switch to Cyrillic 3. Type s 4. Swich to latin 5. Type r 6. Switch to Cyrilic 7. Type o 8. Swich to Latin 9.Type soft.com
Don't think that's very likely, do you? And of course, people who use 'alternative' character sets can also quickly see if the domain is in latin or in (for example) cyrillic and switch keyboards accordingly.
The only real problem I see (which was mentioned in some other post) is with emails - someone might send you an email instructing you to click to www.microsoft.com, where you could be fooled into thinking you came to the right site.
I am typing as long as I can remeber (I got my first spectrum at the age of 5).
A few years ago I started getting pains in my wrists. They were not very sharp, but prevented me, for example, for doing push ups. I would have this pains on and off every couple of months.
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. I then changed keyboards - at work I use Microsoft Natural Keyboard and at home Logitech Wireless Natural. The good news is I have not had any problems ever since.
Just a suggestion to people reading this article and deciding to go with "natural look":) - I would recommend buying M$ keyboard (I know, I know, M$ is evil and stuff), because their design is more egronomic - buttons in the bottom row (CTRL, ALT, WIN, Properties) are very large - they are tiny on the Logitech keyboard. Also, Logitech has decided to save space some more by changing the layout of position buttons: Home and End key are aligned in one row over Insert and PgUp key (so you get a 2x3 matrix instead of 3x2). This can be confusing at beginnig until you are used to it.
I agree. And, come on, how much technology do you need?
This is my solution to stopping spambots. It's in a JavaServlet technology and I am posting it here to prevent my company's site from being slashdotted. It does not prevent the spammer from harvesting emails it just slows them down.... a lot:) If everyone had a script like this, spambots would be unusable.
Feel free to use the code in anyway you please (LGPL like and stuff)
Put robots.txt in your root folder. Content:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/members/
Put StopSpammersServlet.java in WEB-INF/classes/com/parsek/util:
package com.parsek.util; // Slashdot lameness filter trick... sklj lijef oiwej goweignm lkjhg woeèi weoij woefh woegih weoigj woefm weoikjf woeifh woefhpweifjwopejf pw // Slashdot lameness filter trick... flk joweij pgwej pweof,mpeof,mpweorj pweomfwpegj pwehg woeigh owèefij woeij eogih oibhwepoi upeorw wpeo // Slashdot lameness filter trick... fkjew fiwje spbojkwe gkwpeori wpbv-j wpeofksweok pweorjsw eigjhwoeifj pweorj wepoj wepfomwe fpmwoe fpowe // Slashdot lameness filter trick... epoiw epw0 w'pg wpoe wpeom, wpog wepfoiwpeor kwpeof, wpobm wepofkwpeofk wopvf,w bowkpeoirf pwoef,mwepof p // Slashdot lameness filter trick... vlwkepo wesp ibebemwf èsdm fèefo.bp kwèpef èlfk èeofsw èegjwegoweofiw peok èglks dgèlksdfèokwe ofèkwe èfoe
import java.io.File;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import javax.servlet.ServletContext;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Enumeration;
import java.lang.reflect.Array;
public class StopSpammersServlet extends javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet {
private static String[] names = { "root", "webmaster", "postmaster", "abuse", "abuse", "abuse", "bill", "john", "jane", "richard", "billy", "mike", "michelle", "george", "michael", "britney" };
private static String[] lasts = { "gates", "crystal", "fonda", "gere", "crystal", "scheffield", "douglas", "spears", "greene", "walker", "bush", "harisson" };
private String[] endns = new String[7];
private static long getNumberOfShashes(String path) {
int i = 1;
java.util.StringTokenizer st = new java.util.StringTokenizer(path, "/");
while(st.hasMoreTokens()) { i++; st.nextToken(); }
return(i);
} // Respond to HTTP GET requests from browsers.
public void doGet (javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest request,
javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse response)
throws javax.servlet.ServletException, java.io.IOException { // Set content type for HTML.
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8"); // Output goes to the response PrintWriter.
java.io.PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
try {
ServletContext servletContext = getServletContext();
endns[0] = "localhost";
endns[1] = "127.0.0.1";
endns[2] = "2130706433";
endns[3] = "fbi.gov";
endns[4] = "whitehouse.gov";
endns[5] = request.getRemoteAddr();
endns[6] = request.getRemoteHost();
String query = request.getQueryString();
String path = request.getPathInfo();
out.println("<html>");
out.println("<head>");
out.println("<title>Members area</title>");
out.println("</head>");
out.println("<body>");
out.println("<p>Hello random visitor. There is a big chance you are a robot collecting mail addresses and have no place being here.");
out.println("Therefore you will get some random generated email addresses and some random links to follow endlessly.</p>");
out.println("<p>Please be aware that your IP has been logged and will be reported to proper authorities if required.</p>");
out.println("<p>Also note that browsing through the tree will get slower and slower and gradually stop you from spidering other sites.</p>");
response.flushBuffer();
long sleepTime = (long) Math.pow(3, getNumberOfShashes(path));
} while (Math.random()
out.print("<br>");
do {
int a = (int) (Math.random() * 1000);
out.print("<a href=\"" + a + "/\">" + a + "</a> ");
Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
response.flushBuffer();
} while (Math.random()
out.println("</body>");
out.println("</html>");
} catch (Exception e) { // If an Exception occurs, return the error to the client.
out.write("<pre>");
out.write(e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace(out);
out.write("</pre>");
} // Close the PrintWriter.
out.close();
}
}
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about y'all but personally I think that buying music online @ 128kbs is a rip-off.
My reasining being (based on totally personal views and observations): you download music @ 128kbs and you are aware it's not an excellent quality, but "quite good enough".
Now, if I were to buy the music online I would excect at least the same quality I get on CD; so let's say, a 256kbs or more MP3 would be reasonable. And it would be reasonable for me to do the same thing with that music as I do with my CDs: (re)encode the to OGG, put them on my computer/stereo/car player/portable player/take them to a (private) party with me... If I paid for it, I'll make damn sure others are not getting it for free.
Please note: I am not aware of any of the sites selling music that offer this kind of service, so don't pls don't rampage about that.
Oh, really?
:-/
And what constitues as "normal"? ASCI? ISO-8859-1? What about ISO-8859-2 or ISO-8859-* that share most of the letters?
Will you be displaying a-z in black and all others with dictational marks (for example, german letters with umlauts and such) with purple?
That's a funny way of looking at the address
Let's see:
German Layout: There's a really old one for the Mac: Doesn't work for me (PC user) or any MacX user
Norwegian, Swedish: links time out.
Japanese & Spanish: this seem ok.
But the fact is, that still most of the world doesn't speak these languages. I dare you: find Dvorak keyboards layouts for slavic (polish, slovenian, russian, slovak, croatian, czech, serbian, romanian ...) languages, chinese, thai, greek, portugese,... My additional requirement is that they are supported by most modern systems (Linux, W2k+, MacX).
You'll have trouble finding them because they don't exist or if they do they can be installed on only very narrow set of OSes.
My point being: the Dvorak layout has been designed for the US layouts only. :-/
> So let's use a keyboard designed for people, not machines, shall we?
Funny, haven't seen a Dvorak keyboard yet designed for non-English speaking people (read: no international characters!)
> One feature I like that I haven't found in Firefox is profile switching. Not a big deal, but a nice feature.
Start firefox like this: "firefox.exe -ProfileManager"
> IE is signed code...do you trust it? I don't.
IE's signature tells you for sure it came from Microsoft. Another reason to trust it even less :-)
Hah!
What if electricity goes out? Then your LCD-hanging-everywhere-house will be without any pictures and mine plain-printed-photographs-house will still have everything on the walls.
Even worse - think about your pictures getting a virus and flushing everything into a black hole.
I don't know which page you were looking at, but Microsoft says that the cheapest W2K3 SBS is $599 (not counting upgrades). And that's only for 5 named users! Add 20 users ($776) and you come to a hefty sum of $1375! And that's the SBS Standard edition (without the SQL, ISA and FP server). Additional restrictions also apply.
So, $500 is really a bit of an understatement. (To be fair, I haven't checked what you get with RH for $350 or $800).
You should have said "get a PS2 || Gamecube."
:-)
Promoting Xbox over these two on slashdot is same as promoting Win over Linux
That is true.
As an individual, you have that right.
For the record, I do agree with you; I just wanted to give people another point of view.
As an economist, I had to reply to this post.
No corporation is Evil (TM) or Good (TM). They are simply seeking Profit (TM).
Why is Microsoft giving the cheapest licences to people not running any Linux? Because it's the way to sell most of their software.
Why is Cisco helping build the Big Firewall of China? Because it brings them a lot of profit.
Why is Google such a nice company? Because, by playing nice, they appeal to a lot of people and attract customers and this means profit.
So, like it or not - profit is the key.
For example, if M$ would BELIVE (this is the key factor) they would make more money by - for example - completely opensourcing WinXP and just selling consulting and training, they would do it in a pinch and everybody would go like "Ohh, look at M$, they are so good (TM)!"
Capitalism at its best.
Something I remember from high-school:
We had to prove that every prime, except for 1,2 and 3 takes the form:
(6k+1) or (6k-1)
We have proven the point.
So, all primes > 3 are subset of this group.
If you extend this to be a bit more abstract, you come to the conclusion:
If you number all primes from 1 on with p1...pn and your last found prime with pk, than you can safely say that all following primes *MUST* be a subgroup of:
p[1]*p[2]*...*p[k] +/- (p[1],p[2],...,p[k-1])
This is somewhere between the array and brute force method described in the article because you increase the step as you go and the multiplier can be just multiplied with the last found prime in each iteration. The downside being, that you still need to check if the number is prime by deviding it with all prime number found so far which are less than sqrt(n).
This also shows possible gaps between primes.
Come on... it's sunday evening... and i'm at work... and been working for some time now... and my brain doesn't move the fingers in the way it is supposed to...
Damn!
Than what have I been studying for the last 4 years?
Seriouslly: Economics *IS* a science. The only problem lies in the fact, that it is more of a social science (like sociology, philosophy) than a fact-based science (mathemathics, physics...). Saying economics is not a science is like saying pyhiatry is not a science.
Economics is a science that tries to determine how people will act based on the previous emphirical data. That's why you'll get 7 different answers if you ask 7 different economists for a forcast.
> They are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
I know that most of the /. crowd thinks that flash bloats the interface, but I happen to work for a web development company that has quite a few designers experienced with Flash. IMHO a good Flash interface can enrichen the whole experience and not be used just for banners.
For example, A lot of car sites use flash for presentation and it works wonders.
Check out, for example the new minisite for Peugeot 407 (click the view animation). It's not the best example, but try doing that in HTML 3.0. I'd post a few links to our sites, but don't like the idea of being slasdotted.
~ # joe
-sh: joe: command not found
~ # apt-get joe
~ # joe
I'll just wait for someone else to do it and download songs from Kazaa. :)
I don't know about US, but in Slovenia (and I think EU, also), beer *is* food, along with wine.
Where do I get this information from? There are only two VAT rates in EU: the low one for food and similar and the high one for everything else. Beer and wine are in the "food VAT section". Generally speaking, since the alchohol level is less than 20 it is still considered food (so, strong drinks - Whiskey & co. - are not).
Finally, it is quite normal to drink a glass or two of wine / beer with your meal while drinking a glass or two of Scotch is certanly not :-)
I'd be more than happy if some of my teachers started using methods that are not 30 years old, for starters :)
I don't know about you guys, but in my part of the country you always have at least one keyboard layout installed (for your locale), in most cases two (yours and English).
.Type soft.com
I can tell you for a fact, that all people using 'alternative' (as in non-ASCII) character sets always have two locales installed.
For example, in Serbia, both character sets are used - cyrillic and latin. So, to type in www.microsoft.com with cyrillic c (by the way, 'c' is 's' in cyrillic) and o, one would have to:
1. Type www.mi
2. Switch to Cyrillic
3. Type s
4. Swich to latin
5. Type r
6. Switch to Cyrilic
7. Type o
8. Swich to Latin
9
Don't think that's very likely, do you? And of course, people who use 'alternative' character sets can also quickly see if the domain is in latin or in (for example) cyrillic and switch keyboards accordingly.
The only real problem I see (which was mentioned in some other post) is with emails - someone might send you an email instructing you to click to www.microsoft.com, where you could be fooled into thinking you came to the right site.
I am typing as long as I can remeber (I got my first spectrum at the age of 5).
:) - I would recommend buying M$ keyboard (I know, I know, M$ is evil and stuff), because their design is more egronomic - buttons in the bottom row (CTRL, ALT, WIN, Properties) are very large - they are tiny on the Logitech keyboard. Also, Logitech has decided to save space some more by changing the layout of position buttons: Home and End key are aligned in one row over Insert and PgUp key (so you get a 2x3 matrix instead of 3x2). This can be confusing at beginnig until you are used to it.
A few years ago I started getting pains in my wrists. They were not very sharp, but prevented me, for example, for doing push ups. I would have this pains on and off every couple of months.
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. I then changed keyboards - at work I use Microsoft Natural Keyboard and at home Logitech Wireless Natural. The good news is I have not had any problems ever since.
Just a suggestion to people reading this article and deciding to go with "natural look"
Just my 0.02 Euro.
Ufff...
It's not my day; change those weird if(a...) to if(a<...), of course.
Thank you.
Me again.
:)
HTML ate some code. If using this, change those weird ifs to this:
if(a 3) { email = name; } else
if(a 4) { email = last; } else
if(a 5) { email = name.charAt(0) + "." + last; } else
if(a 6) { email = name + "." + last; } else
if(a 7) { email = name + "." + last.charAt(0); } else
if(a 8) { email = last + "." + name; } else
if(a 9) { email = last + name; } else
if(a 10) { email = name + last; } else
if(a 11) { email = name.charAt(0) + last; } else
if(a 12) { email = last + name.charAt(0); } else
if(a 13) { email = name + last.charAt(0); } else
if(a 14) { email = last.charAt(0) + name; } else
if(a 15) { email = last + name.charAt(0); }
email = email + "@" + endn;
Sorry.
I agree. And, come on, how much technology do you need?
This is my solution to stopping spambots. It's in a JavaServlet technology and I am posting it here to prevent my company's site from being slashdotted. It does not prevent the spammer from harvesting emails it just slows them down.... a lot :) If everyone had a script like this, spambots would be unusable.
Feel free to use the code in anyway you please (LGPL like and stuff)
Put robots.txt in your root folder. Content:
User-agent: *Disallow:
Put StopSpammersServlet.java in WEB-INF/classes/com/parsek/util:
package com.parsek.util;import java.io.File;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import javax.servlet.ServletContext;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Enumeration;
import java.lang.reflect.Array;
public class StopSpammersServlet extends javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet {
private static String[] names = { "root", "webmaster", "postmaster", "abuse", "abuse", "abuse", "bill", "john", "jane", "richard", "billy", "mike", "michelle", "george", "michael", "britney" };
private static String[] lasts = { "gates", "crystal", "fonda", "gere", "crystal", "scheffield", "douglas", "spears", "greene", "walker", "bush", "harisson" };
private String[] endns = new String[7];
private static long getNumberOfShashes(String path) {
int i = 1;
java.util.StringTokenizer st = new java.util.StringTokenizer(path, "/");
while(st.hasMoreTokens()) { i++; st.nextToken(); }
return(i);
}
public void doGet (javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest request,
javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse response)
throws javax.servlet.ServletException, java.io.IOException {
response.setContentType("text/html; charset=UTF-8");
java.io.PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
try {
ServletContext servletContext = getServletContext();
endns[0] = "localhost";
endns[1] = "127.0.0.1";
endns[2] = "2130706433";
endns[3] = "fbi.gov";
endns[4] = "whitehouse.gov";
endns[5] = request.getRemoteAddr();
endns[6] = request.getRemoteHost();
String query = request.getQueryString();
String path = request.getPathInfo();
out.println("<html>");
out.println("<head>");
out.println("<title>Members area</title>");
out.println("</head>");
out.println("<body>");
out.println("<p>Hello random visitor. There is a big chance you are a robot collecting mail addresses and have no place being here.");
out.println("Therefore you will get some random generated email addresses and some random links to follow endlessly.</p>");
out.println("<p>Please be aware that your IP has been logged and will be reported to proper authorities if required.</p>");
out.println("<p>Also note that browsing through the tree will get slower and slower and gradually stop you from spidering other sites.</p>");
response.flushBuffer();
long sleepTime = (long) Math.pow(3, getNumberOfShashes(path));
do {
String name = names[ (int) (Math.random() * Array.getLength(names)) ];
String last = lasts[ (int) (Math.random() * Array.getLength(lasts)) ];
String endn = endns[ (int) (Math.random() * Array.getLength(endns)) ];
String email= "";
double a = Math.random() * 15;
if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a if(a email = email + "@" + endn;
out.print("<a href=\"mailto:" + email + "\">" + email + "</a><br>");
response.flushBuffer();
Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
} while (Math.random()
out.print("<br>");
do {
int a = (int) (Math.random() * 1000);
out.print("<a href=\"" + a + "/\">" + a + "</a> ");
Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
response.flushBuffer();
} while (Math.random() out.println("</body>");
out.println("</html>");
} catch (Exception e) {
out.write("<pre>");
out.write(e.getMessage());
e.printStackTrace(out);
out.write("</pre>");
}
out.close();
}
}
Put this in your WEB-INF/web.xml
<servlet><servlet-name>stopSpammers</servlet-name& gt;
<servlet-class>com.parsek.util.StopSpammersS ervlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>stopSpammers</servlet-name& gt;
<url-pattern>/members/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
Here you go. No PHP, no APache, no mySQL, no Perl, just one servlet container.
Ciao