In my lifetime, the obvious example of repurposing a charitable organization is the March of Dimes. Polio was cured, so after a mad scramble they chose birth defects, which has the advantage that it will probably never be cured.
That sounds like some Internet standards groups, of which TLS and X.509 spring immediately to mind:
I read that the point of these food emojis was to be able to universally indicate allergies/intolerance/diets on restaurant menus. Which seems like a good reason.
No-one's allergic to ducks. The emoji was added so people can indicate they have anatidaephobia.
We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.
I would agree with you, but not before they introduct an emoji for "Ah fsck, I know I went out to pick up some more nappies and baby formula but they had a discount on beer right next to the entrance and after I got that I forgot about the baby stuff because they had beer nuts as well, those little crunchy ones where you can eat a ton of them without them making you feel sick, and then I ran into Joe, you remember Joe, we were at school together, and what with one thing and another I completely forgot the nappies so I'm heading back again now to pick them up, which is why I'll be late". Then you'd need a few variants to deal with things like running into your friend Alex instead of Joe, the beer nuts actually being pretzels, and so on. As soon as they add the emojis for those critical communications, we'll be done.
A large part of the world still worries about the next meal , roof overhead and the other basic necessities of life . Garbage is the last thing on their mind . Some of them live in or near garbage.
I see a great opportunity here, just need to figure out how to get them into the Pacific...
Fact: The Met Office is the most successful weather forecasting organization on the planet.
Yep, they sure are. Some of my clothes still haven't dried out from the marvellous barbeque summer they forecast a few years ago. And it wasn't just once, they forecast three of them in a row. Holy fsck, even a coin-toss would have been right at least one of those times.
They don't generally use percentage chances of rain, they just say vague things like "scattered showers" or even worse "it will rain".
That's exactly the bollocks the NZ MetService does as well, hiding the actual data in useless generalisations. Maybe the BBC went looking for an organisation whose forecasting sucks as much as the UK MetService, and decided the NZ MetService fit the bill.
(There was an evaluation done some time in the 1970s or 1980s - can't find the study right now so I can't cite it, sorry - about effective presentation of weather data, things like "a chance of rain tomorrow" vs. "45% chance of rain between 3pm and 5pm tomorrow", with the more-information version winning hands down. Most of the world's forecasts, if they weren't doing it already (apparently it was more common in the US at the time, less common in Europe), switched to the more-data format. The UK and NZ MetService didn't).
Given how appallingly useless and invariably inaccurate the weather forecasts are here in NZ
That's because you're using the MetService one. Use MetVUW instead.
Alternatively, put it to the test and see. I once spent a week tracking the actual weather vs. reports from the MetService, MetVUW, Google Weather, Wunderground, and a few others. The MetService came pretty much dead last, Wunderground and Google Weather were pretty good. MetVUW just gives you all the data you need to sort it out yourself so it's in a slightly different class, but I usually use that to check what the flying will be like.
Sheesh, the NZ MetService can't even guess NZ's weather, let alone what's going to happen in the UK. Having said that, the article said "companies in NZ", which could be something like MetVUW, which regularly outperforms the MetService in accuracy, as well as providing much more detailed information than the MetService's dumbed-down "it may rain tomorrow, but fscked if we're going to give you any more information than that".
(It's always interesting being with groups like pilots who are required to use the MetService info by law and see them going to MetVUW to see what's really going on).
Im sure plenty of slashdotters will invest time and effort in explaining how this can be manipulated by unscrupulous hackers and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine user security.
Actually I'm more curious as to why this is "new". I could do the same thing with a 20-year-old PC with a sound card (I'm limiting it at 20 years to get some sort of reasonable Pentium with MMX, before that you start to run into CPU horsepower problems depending on what you want to do with the capability), why is it some "feature" of Skylake?
Bah, forget this newfangled crap, Multics was doing this half a century ago (which includes use of RAID tape drives, checkpointing, ACLs, and other recent innovations).
I'd call it a slablet. And, if it wasn't stoopidly expensive (which, knowing Samsung, it will be, so I hope the clones come out fairly quickly afterwards), I'd buy one, since it'll sure beat my current 9.7" one for readability.
I guess you haven't been reading the recent/. posts about what network-trace analysis has shown it actually does (not what Microsoft claims it does)...
The Amazon link currently shows a review that talks about the advantages of upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 95, and the sad thing is that, at least for the UI, it's actually true. Instead of being held hostage to some braindead agenda to make my desktop PC look like a cellphone, with Win95's UI everything just works the way it should.
(Oh, and unlike another recent offering it doesn't send every keystroke and whatnot to Microsoft for analysis either).
Let's start a betting pool. Put me in for $50 that Mozilla Corporation goes under within a year of ending support for XPCOM extensions.
What you'd need for that is a rerun of the Netscape/Phoenix thing, where the backlash against the fuckup that Mozilla has made of their browser is sufficiently large that it gets forked, all the crap they've larded onto it gets removed, and it starts again. Given the XPCOM/XUL change, that may actually be enough to do it, either giving something like Iceweasel enough momentum to gain traction or starting a new fork that goes ahead like Phoenix did.
The only problem is that we may end up with 1-2 years without a terribly viable browser during the transition...
Funny thing about this, I have a business-grade Lenovo laptop, and whenever one of these stories has come out I've looked to see whether I've got whatever backdoor/malware is being talked about on my machine. Nothing. No trace of any of them. So it seems the way to avoid these things is to buy a business-market Lenovo PC, not a home/casual-user market one. Backdooring large businesses seems to be something they don't want to risk...
(One possible reason for this is that apart from the political repercussions, you're paying a significant premium for their business-grade hardware, so they don't need to subsidise it with adware and other crap).
That was my immediate response to this as well: They really are doing everything they possibly can to drive their market share down to zero as fast as they can. The pile of extensions I use (admittedly half of them are now required to undo all the crap they've added to Chromefox) are the sole reason I still use the browser. If they kill the ability to run the extensions, there's zero reason for me to keep using it. And one more step towards a market share of zero, which seems to be their goal.
Slashdot Mirror
In my lifetime, the obvious example of repurposing a charitable organization is the March of Dimes. Polio was cured, so after a mad scramble they chose birth defects, which has the advantage that it will probably never be cured.
That sounds like some Internet standards groups, of which TLS and X.509 spring immediately to mind:
Is the Internet secure yet?
No? Well then keep standardising, dammit!
It has four digits in the mid-5000s allocated some 20 years ago and since they're up to ~46,000 now that makes me an Internet alpha male.
Huh, I have a three-digit one. Some of my closer neighbours in the IANA list have email addresses that are bang-paths.
Oh gawd, if you're in Internet alpha male, that probably makes me an Internet dinosaur, just one step removed from the fossils with two-digit ones.
I read that the point of these food emojis was to be able to universally indicate allergies/intolerance/diets on restaurant menus. Which seems like a good reason.
No-one's allergic to ducks. The emoji was added so people can indicate they have anatidaephobia.
We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.
I would agree with you, but not before they introduct an emoji for "Ah fsck, I know I went out to pick up some more nappies and baby formula but they had a discount on beer right next to the entrance and after I got that I forgot about the baby stuff because they had beer nuts as well, those little crunchy ones where you can eat a ton of them without them making you feel sick, and then I ran into Joe, you remember Joe, we were at school together, and what with one thing and another I completely forgot the nappies so I'm heading back again now to pick them up, which is why I'll be late". Then you'd need a few variants to deal with things like running into your friend Alex instead of Joe, the beer nuts actually being pretzels, and so on. As soon as they add the emojis for those critical communications, we'll be done.
Apparently 15 Americans are crushed to death moving their furniture every year!
That's nothing compared to the number of couches crushed each year by Americans.
A large part of the world still worries about the next meal , roof overhead and the other basic necessities of life . Garbage is the last thing on their mind . Some of them live in or near garbage .
I see a great opportunity here, just need to figure out how to get them into the Pacific...
Loseless PNG images just lack the warmth and vibrance of raw BMP images. Even RLE introduces noticable artifacts.
That only works if you use a tube-based computer to do the decoding.
Fact: The Met Office is the most successful weather forecasting organization on the planet.
Yep, they sure are. Some of my clothes still haven't dried out from the marvellous barbeque summer they forecast a few years ago. And it wasn't just once, they forecast three of them in a row. Holy fsck, even a coin-toss would have been right at least one of those times.
Oh wait, you said "successful", not "accurate". Well that's certainly true, when it comes to raking in the dough and splurging at taxpayers expense they've certainly got things sewn up.
They don't generally use percentage chances of rain, they just say vague things like "scattered showers" or even worse "it will rain".
That's exactly the bollocks the NZ MetService does as well, hiding the actual data in useless generalisations. Maybe the BBC went looking for an organisation whose forecasting sucks as much as the UK MetService, and decided the NZ MetService fit the bill.
(There was an evaluation done some time in the 1970s or 1980s - can't find the study right now so I can't cite it, sorry - about effective presentation of weather data, things like "a chance of rain tomorrow" vs. "45% chance of rain between 3pm and 5pm tomorrow", with the more-information version winning hands down. Most of the world's forecasts, if they weren't doing it already (apparently it was more common in the US at the time, less common in Europe), switched to the more-data format. The UK and NZ MetService didn't).
Given how appallingly useless and invariably inaccurate the weather forecasts are here in NZ
That's because you're using the MetService one. Use MetVUW instead.
Alternatively, put it to the test and see. I once spent a week tracking the actual weather vs. reports from the MetService, MetVUW, Google Weather, Wunderground, and a few others. The MetService came pretty much dead last, Wunderground and Google Weather were pretty good. MetVUW just gives you all the data you need to sort it out yourself so it's in a slightly different class, but I usually use that to check what the flying will be like.
Sheesh, the NZ MetService can't even guess NZ's weather, let alone what's going to happen in the UK. Having said that, the article said "companies in NZ", which could be something like MetVUW, which regularly outperforms the MetService in accuracy, as well as providing much more detailed information than the MetService's dumbed-down "it may rain tomorrow, but fscked if we're going to give you any more information than that".
(It's always interesting being with groups like pilots who are required to use the MetService info by law and see them going to MetVUW to see what's really going on).
It's NOT FREE damnit, stop posting this nonsense.
You're right, it's significantly overpriced for what you're getting.
Im sure plenty of slashdotters will invest time and effort in explaining how this can be manipulated by unscrupulous hackers and foreign intelligence agencies to undermine user security.
Actually I'm more curious as to why this is "new". I could do the same thing with a 20-year-old PC with a sound card (I'm limiting it at 20 years to get some sort of reasonable Pentium with MMX, before that you start to run into CPU horsepower problems depending on what you want to do with the capability), why is it some "feature" of Skylake?
Bah, forget this newfangled crap, Multics was doing this half a century ago (which includes use of RAID tape drives, checkpointing, ACLs, and other recent innovations).
MIT's new "crash-proof file system" crashed today amid accusations of bugs in the formal proof verification software used to formally verify it.
So the whole thing was a bit of a Coq-up?
How do you prove Coq is correct
You use the formal proof assistant Pusi to prove it correct. So what you do is feed Coq into Pusi, and then nine months later the proof drops out.
If we can accept 'slow', it's not that difficult to build an always consistent filesystem.
citation required
Sheesh, do we have to do the Googling for you?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-- Donald Knuth.
This new filesystem sounds like another case of this...
No, it should be called a TV.
I'd call it a slablet. And, if it wasn't stoopidly expensive (which, knowing Samsung, it will be, so I hope the clones come out fairly quickly afterwards), I'd buy one, since it'll sure beat my current 9.7" one for readability.
I guess you haven't been reading the recent /. posts about what network-trace analysis has shown it actually does (not what Microsoft claims it does)...
The Amazon link currently shows a review that talks about the advantages of upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 95, and the sad thing is that, at least for the UI, it's actually true. Instead of being held hostage to some braindead agenda to make my desktop PC look like a cellphone, with Win95's UI everything just works the way it should.
(Oh, and unlike another recent offering it doesn't send every keystroke and whatnot to Microsoft for analysis either).
Let's start a betting pool. Put me in for $50 that Mozilla Corporation goes under within a year of ending support for XPCOM extensions.
What you'd need for that is a rerun of the Netscape/Phoenix thing, where the backlash against the fuckup that Mozilla has made of their browser is sufficiently large that it gets forked, all the crap they've larded onto it gets removed, and it starts again. Given the XPCOM/XUL change, that may actually be enough to do it, either giving something like Iceweasel enough momentum to gain traction or starting a new fork that goes ahead like Phoenix did.
The only problem is that we may end up with 1-2 years without a terribly viable browser during the transition...
Funny thing about this, I have a business-grade Lenovo laptop, and whenever one of these stories has come out I've looked to see whether I've got whatever backdoor/malware is being talked about on my machine. Nothing. No trace of any of them. So it seems the way to avoid these things is to buy a business-market Lenovo PC, not a home/casual-user market one. Backdooring large businesses seems to be something they don't want to risk...
(One possible reason for this is that apart from the political repercussions, you're paying a significant premium for their business-grade hardware, so they don't need to subsidise it with adware and other crap).
That was my immediate response to this as well: They really are doing everything they possibly can to drive their market share down to zero as fast as they can. The pile of extensions I use (admittedly half of them are now required to undo all the crap they've added to Chromefox) are the sole reason I still use the browser. If they kill the ability to run the extensions, there's zero reason for me to keep using it. And one more step towards a market share of zero, which seems to be their goal.
You know what professors should be paid, and adjuncts.
Yup, about a tenth of what the football coach gets paid. Rising to an eighth for the dean.