Thanks lilo for your work on freenode, you made many open source projects possible and brought together thousands of people. My condolances go out to his friends and relatives, I feel sorry for your loss.
Pity us that only receive Discovery Channel. Remember the good ol' days with Beyond 2000?. Now that show was awesome, the latest advances in technology and science (Kind of like slashdot 8 years ago), but understandable enough for John Doe.
Maybe I'm just getting old. Damn kids, get off my lawn!
I agree, I don't see the 'massive' aspect of MMORPG's currently. Sure, 40-man raids can get chaotic, but 40 people, Quake could handle that number concurrently years ago. Guess it's a balance between the number of people able to fight together and the complexity of the gameplay.
I tried WoW 18 months ago, it was great fun having large-scale inter-faction raids, but all the instanced extra PvE/Battleground content more or less stopped all of that. In time, I do hope to be able to pick up my sword again and charge at 1000+ orcs. Roleplaying is fine and all, but being tiny part of a giant onslaught, the blood and gore flying through the air, wave upon wave of men and beast crashing in upon eachother... now that's MMORPG'ing.
I don't know if you get SMTP yourself. You receive email via SMTP (port 25). So actually, if they were to see themselves as 'Port 25' then they see it as a means to get feedback and thus listen to us. Exactly as MS meant.
Oh, and please hand in your geek card at the door.
Whatever happened to Journalistic integrity you remember...unbiased, objective and serving the common good.
In my humble opinion there is no such thing as being unbiased. Everyone is biased through their culture if they like it or not. Given the news recently, I really don't see a difference between bloggers feeding their ego's or journalists filling their pockets.
But maybe I'm just a cynical grumpy old man. Get off my lawn, dammit!
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I hadn't heard about An Inconvenient Truth before. Thanks to DCI and the youtube trailer, I think this is one movie worth watching, if only due to Katrina and the massive heatwaves over the US and Europe this summer.
Get off your high horse. Besides, maybe if american cars were gulping down less gas per mile we might be able to save a few years to develop alternatives. Just a thought.
What would you do? There's really no good answer here, but would you just sit back and let your people be killed and kidnapped?
There is a time when payback ends and it starts to become a bloodbath. When you have seen images like these on the news I think most people will agree with me that Israel has had their pound of flesh, and then some.
I don't know what I would do. Thankfully I'm not a member of this war. But this, this isn't what any religeous person would want to do to their fellow man.
Oh yes, after throwing some leaflets it's perfectly justified to bomb the place. The civilians bombed already fled their homes, and most of the people there don't have any means of getting far enough from the bombing. Suicide bombers? I'm sorry, that's just Hamas that were trying to get back at Israel by any means possible. If you're driven into concentration camps you don't have many means for fighting a war other than 'terrorist acts'. You know, back during the second world war the Nazi's called resistance raids 'terrorist activities'. But that's a whole different story and I'd hate to invoke Godwin's Law.
But don't worry, I'm sure you feel mighty rightful after the actions of Israel. I'm not pro- or contra anything. Unless it's senseless violence and slaughtering of innocent people. Sure, you have the right to retaliate, but moderately and fairly against the ones who hit you.
But then again, it's all just a bunch of statistics. Who cares about the children, unless they are American brats, right?
"Israelis are sleeping in bomb shelters. Lebanese are sleeping with bombs."
Tell that to the 54 Lebanese civilians killed this morning. Not a single Israeli died due to Hezbulla attacks before this war started, the attacks by Hezbulla only escalated after Israel began their rampage against the people of Lebanon. You say terrorist? I say they are rightfully retaliating by any means necessary.
You're the idiot here who has been listening too long to American propaganda. Why don't you open your mind and take a look at what the BBC has to say on this. 750 Lebaneese died according to their story. What Israel is doing is a war crime, and it is nearly as bad to justify it with lies. Israel is the aggressor and has needlessly escalated this conflict into an all-out war. Again, I'm no fan of Hezbulla, but please try to keep objective and look at the facts.
Mod me troll if you want to, but having read all the pro-israeli comments just makes my stomach turn. Only this morning over 50 Lebanon civilians, many of them children, were killed by Israeli bombs.
Yes yes, Hesbulla has been lobbing rockets at Haifa, but this was only after Israel flattened half of Beirut.
Oh sure, they kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers, how could I forget! But is that reason enough to slaughter 450+ civilians? If a para-military group in Canada kidnaps 2 people, do you start bombing Toronto?
And now back to why the rest of the world really hates the US right now: because they could have easily supported UN resolutions or stopped Israel but they didn't. They are just letting the bloodshed continue, angering millions of muslims even more. Israel is firing US-arms in a unilateral war against a sovereign nation. Doing so, they are only strengthening the ranks of Hesbulla and isolating themselves even more. I am no Hesbulla-fan, but think about what you all are cheering for: supporting Israel at this point is no better than supporting Bin Laden when he struck New York: an unilateral, unprovoked attack on a civilian population.
And if hacking US websites is a way to get that into American heads, so be it.
Small wonder that those countries where the people were asked their opinion voiced a strong NO. However, it will take something stronger to really wake up the EU politicians.
Sorry, as a No-voter I must correct you on this: we voted against the EU constitution, not against the EU. Most people, like me, aren't anti-EU but would just want the EU to take it a bit more slowly. And you can't compare the US with the EU, NAFTA/EU is a better comparison. That was the main reason why most rejected the constitution: We don't want to become the United States of Europe.
I think you underestimate how much work the FSF puts into the GNU toolchain. The only people having something to win with sticking to GPL v2 are people holding patents and trumpeting DRM/TC. I expect efforts into v2-forks will be short-lived.
Or perhaps you are for the "People of Earth". How touching! Except how can you declare an allegance with every single person on earth, some of which may not want you to exist.
And this is something specific to every single person on earth? If you declare an allegiance with all the people in your country, it's possible that some would not want you to exist either. Heck, my neighbour might hate my guts. That doesn't mean that I don't feel a part of my neighbourhood. What follows is that you can just as easily declare an allegiance with every single person on earth.
Hi people of Earth! As a fellow member of the species 'homo sapiens' I salute you! May your life be fulfilling and prosperous!
It's only silly if your view is narrow enough to consider everyone not in your country to be 'alien'. I tend to have a different point of view.
This is something I've been wondering about. To those people in grad school: have you ever signed a contract that states that the university gets copyright of everything you make? I sure as hell know I haven't and I can't imagine that a university would be so anal as to claim copyright, but then again I don't live in the States and IANAL.
It would be different if you had a contract as an assistent or something. But even with my current employer I can freely contribute code made under work if the project isn't our core business. If you're good enough to bring up the topic open source contributions, any supervisor or employer worth his salt shouldn't scare you away by forbidding it. That's just silly.
Exactly what I was thinking. We have fiber at the university dorm, they advertised it as 1Gb/s for 10 euros. Alas, that was the speed of the backbone of the dorm, everything is capped at 10MB/s. Still not bad though.
Translated from the Televaag, sorry for any grammar errors:
The municipality of Groningen is going to be the first major municipality in the Netherlands to use OpenOffice. This way 330.000 euros will be saved on licencing costs. The council of Groningen agreed yesterdayevening to let the contract with Microsoft for Microsoft Office expire.
The contract with Microsoft for the operatingsystem Windows will be renewed. Groningen counts about 181.000 inhabitants and the municipality itself has about 3650 pc's internally. In Groningen people started investigating the possibilities of using Open Standards and Open Source Software after requests from the council. The reason of this investigation was that they wanted to break the monopoly of large software suppliers and that they didn't want to depend on them for changes to their software.
No switch to Linux
OpenOffice will be installed under Windows in Groningen. From the investigation it became clear that a total switch to an Open platform like Linux currently isn't a viable choice. The municipality does say to strive that workstations in Groningen will run as much software as possible that runs on both Windows and Linux. At a later point in time the switch to Linux would then be easier.
Because they want to avoid the risk of having to ask for general municipality funds if the switch backfires and they want to switch back to Microsoft Office, a large portion (170.000 euros) of the funds will be saved in a "Microsoftlicences" account.
The remainder of the funds (78.450 euros) will be used to form a migrationteam that will start with the preperations of switching to operating-system independent workstations.
I've switched to using only Clusty last fall, and I must say that I rarely use Google anymore (only if I really can't find anything using Clusty, which happens about once or twice a month, or need Scholar). The clustering aspect of Clusty is useful, the privacy policy is straight and clear and the integrated Wikipedia search is a neat feature. And of course Google has become so mainstream that it's not hip to use it anymore.
The only thing is that Clusty isn't something you can easily verb. I often 'google' when I'm really 'clustying'. Or something. Nevermind.
The semantic web is, in my eyes, a typical chicken & egg problem. You've got loads of content on one side, yet current search engines work well enough to not worry about representing that content in a structured way in a markup language like OWL. On the other side, you've got embarassingly few semantic web applications that use structured content. How is a typical web developer going to justify structuring the content on his side if he can't point to an example how it could improve shareholder value? What would exporting our databases in OWL currently solve?
True, the web had a similar problem, however creating a webpage is a lot more interesting (you see the results directly, how terrible they might be you do see a result) than structuring data. The latter takes a lot more work, and the direct benefit just isn't there.
Sem-Web-like standards like RSS, XML and SOAP have become mainstream, but primarily because they fill a gap. The adoption of RDF or OWL simply doesn't solve anything. Yet. It would be cool to let agents loose onto the semantic web and retrieve them together with a summary on a certain subject using a multitude of sources, but as long as it's easier to Google I don't think it would generate any interest outside academia.
Nobody here cared, it didn't even hit the main news. The only reason this ad was pulled was because America had a fit.
The interesting bit that is often not mentioned is that there were two versions, one where a white model held a black model by the throat, and one where the black model took the white model by the throat. I found both pretty decent (and the models aren't half-bad either), a pity I didn't see them irl (I do live in Amsterdam).
What I don't get is why Americans get pissed off by something like this, especially if it isn't in their own neighbourhood. You don't have to act like there aren't any differences between people, some people have blond hair and others have brown skin. It's just the way we are. Racial bias is only racial bias when you believe that one 'race' is better than another.
There's no reason to be hypersensitive about things like this. Live in Amsterdam for a few months and you'll know what a multicultural society really is like. Purist America: Grow up.
I'm sure they're really sweating at Microsoft now...
They should be worried. Compared to their net worth or their operating cash flow, $2.51M a day is nothing, true. However, would you invest in a company losing money that fast? Although $2.51M may seem like a fraction, over a year this is a substantial cut out of their profit margin ($916.15M). Take a look at their stock. A -5.12% drop compared to a modest increase of NASDAQ?
The big question, as another poster commented, is what MSFT has to lose that is worth that much cash. If this goes into effect, they have a serious risk of losing shareholders, as that $916M is cash they would like to get as dividend instead...
Then again, IANAMMSH (I am not a major MSFT stockholder).
Using Adsense you can already measure the cost per conversion (CPC, the cost per sale). Google isn't paying anyone for clicks, it's just a broker between two people buying and selling advertisement-space/clicks. As long as the people buying advertisements get a high enough conversion (which they can already check themselves), this could go on indefinitly.
It would be relatively easy for Google to implement a payment-per-conversion system, however this would put a lot more risk on the person selling advertisement-space, thus it simply won't be used. Google knows this. You'd rather receive $10 a click a few hundred times a month than wait a whole year for someone to get a mortgage which might get you $10000 at once. Plus, there is the drawback of the buyer not playing fair (just remove the google-conversion-tracking bit from your system, and voila, you've earned yourself $10000 and the seller wouldn't know any better).
From what I've seen (I'm no expert on this), I'd say this system is probably even more robust than another famous broker: Ebay. As long as there are people wanting traffic via advertisements and there are people offering advertisements on their websites, Adsense will continue to exist. With Google laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks lilo for your work on freenode, you made many open source projects possible and brought together thousands of people. My condolances go out to his friends and relatives, I feel sorry for your loss.
Maybe I'm just getting old. Damn kids, get off my lawn!
Looks like fuel cells still have a long way to go. Gasoline has an energy density of 32 MJ/l.
I tried WoW 18 months ago, it was great fun having large-scale inter-faction raids, but all the instanced extra PvE/Battleground content more or less stopped all of that. In time, I do hope to be able to pick up my sword again and charge at 1000+ orcs. Roleplaying is fine and all, but being tiny part of a giant onslaught, the blood and gore flying through the air, wave upon wave of men and beast crashing in upon eachother... now that's MMORPG'ing.
Oh, and please hand in your geek card at the door.
But maybe I'm just a cynical grumpy old man. Get off my lawn, dammit!
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I hadn't heard about An Inconvenient Truth before. Thanks to DCI and the youtube trailer, I think this is one movie worth watching, if only due to Katrina and the massive heatwaves over the US and Europe this summer.
Get off your high horse. Besides, maybe if american cars were gulping down less gas per mile we might be able to save a few years to develop alternatives. Just a thought.
I don't know what I would do. Thankfully I'm not a member of this war. But this, this isn't what any religeous person would want to do to their fellow man.
But don't worry, I'm sure you feel mighty rightful after the actions of Israel. I'm not pro- or contra anything. Unless it's senseless violence and slaughtering of innocent people. Sure, you have the right to retaliate, but moderately and fairly against the ones who hit you.
But then again, it's all just a bunch of statistics. Who cares about the children, unless they are American brats, right?
You're the idiot here who has been listening too long to American propaganda. Why don't you open your mind and take a look at what the BBC has to say on this. 750 Lebaneese died according to their story. What Israel is doing is a war crime, and it is nearly as bad to justify it with lies. Israel is the aggressor and has needlessly escalated this conflict into an all-out war. Again, I'm no fan of Hezbulla, but please try to keep objective and look at the facts.
Yes yes, Hesbulla has been lobbing rockets at Haifa, but this was only after Israel flattened half of Beirut.
Oh sure, they kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers, how could I forget! But is that reason enough to slaughter 450+ civilians? If a para-military group in Canada kidnaps 2 people, do you start bombing Toronto?
And now back to why the rest of the world really hates the US right now: because they could have easily supported UN resolutions or stopped Israel but they didn't. They are just letting the bloodshed continue, angering millions of muslims even more. Israel is firing US-arms in a unilateral war against a sovereign nation. Doing so, they are only strengthening the ranks of Hesbulla and isolating themselves even more. I am no Hesbulla-fan, but think about what you all are cheering for: supporting Israel at this point is no better than supporting Bin Laden when he struck New York: an unilateral, unprovoked attack on a civilian population.
And if hacking US websites is a way to get that into American heads, so be it.
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night, please tip the waiter...
I think you underestimate how much work the FSF puts into the GNU toolchain. The only people having something to win with sticking to GPL v2 are people holding patents and trumpeting DRM/TC. I expect efforts into v2-forks will be short-lived.
Having pointed that out, please let me have my troll: Putty indeed nearly makes XP usable. Nearly.
And this is something specific to every single person on earth? If you declare an allegiance with all the people in your country, it's possible that some would not want you to exist either. Heck, my neighbour might hate my guts. That doesn't mean that I don't feel a part of my neighbourhood. What follows is that you can just as easily declare an allegiance with every single person on earth.
Hi people of Earth! As a fellow member of the species 'homo sapiens' I salute you! May your life be fulfilling and prosperous!
It's only silly if your view is narrow enough to consider everyone not in your country to be 'alien'. I tend to have a different point of view.
It would be different if you had a contract as an assistent or something. But even with my current employer I can freely contribute code made under work if the project isn't our core business. If you're good enough to bring up the topic open source contributions, any supervisor or employer worth his salt shouldn't scare you away by forbidding it. That's just silly.
Exactly what I was thinking. We have fiber at the university dorm, they advertised it as 1Gb/s for 10 euros. Alas, that was the speed of the backbone of the dorm, everything is capped at 10MB/s. Still not bad though.
The municipality of Groningen is going to be the first major municipality in the Netherlands to use OpenOffice. This way 330.000 euros will be saved on licencing costs. The council of Groningen agreed yesterdayevening to let the contract with Microsoft for Microsoft Office expire.
The contract with Microsoft for the operatingsystem Windows will be renewed. Groningen counts about 181.000 inhabitants and the municipality itself has about 3650 pc's internally. In Groningen people started investigating the possibilities of using Open Standards and Open Source Software after requests from the council. The reason of this investigation was that they wanted to break the monopoly of large software suppliers and that they didn't want to depend on them for changes to their software.
No switch to Linux
OpenOffice will be installed under Windows in Groningen. From the investigation it became clear that a total switch to an Open platform like Linux currently isn't a viable choice. The municipality does say to strive that workstations in Groningen will run as much software as possible that runs on both Windows and Linux. At a later point in time the switch to Linux would then be easier.
Because they want to avoid the risk of having to ask for general municipality funds if the switch backfires and they want to switch back to Microsoft Office, a large portion (170.000 euros) of the funds will be saved in a "Microsoftlicences" account.
The remainder of the funds (78.450 euros) will be used to form a migrationteam that will start with the preperations of switching to operating-system independent workstations.
The only thing is that Clusty isn't something you can easily verb. I often 'google' when I'm really 'clustying'. Or something. Nevermind.
True, the web had a similar problem, however creating a webpage is a lot more interesting (you see the results directly, how terrible they might be you do see a result) than structuring data. The latter takes a lot more work, and the direct benefit just isn't there.
Sem-Web-like standards like RSS, XML and SOAP have become mainstream, but primarily because they fill a gap. The adoption of RDF or OWL simply doesn't solve anything. Yet. It would be cool to let agents loose onto the semantic web and retrieve them together with a summary on a certain subject using a multitude of sources, but as long as it's easier to Google I don't think it would generate any interest outside academia.
Feel free to prove me wrong though.
The interesting bit that is often not mentioned is that there were two versions, one where a white model held a black model by the throat, and one where the black model took the white model by the throat. I found both pretty decent (and the models aren't half-bad either), a pity I didn't see them irl (I do live in Amsterdam).
What I don't get is why Americans get pissed off by something like this, especially if it isn't in their own neighbourhood. You don't have to act like there aren't any differences between people, some people have blond hair and others have brown skin. It's just the way we are. Racial bias is only racial bias when you believe that one 'race' is better than another.
There's no reason to be hypersensitive about things like this. Live in Amsterdam for a few months and you'll know what a multicultural society really is like. Purist America: Grow up.
The big question, as another poster commented, is what MSFT has to lose that is worth that much cash. If this goes into effect, they have a serious risk of losing shareholders, as that $916M is cash they would like to get as dividend instead...
Then again, IANAMMSH (I am not a major MSFT stockholder).
Using Adsense you can already measure the cost per conversion (CPC, the cost per sale). Google isn't paying anyone for clicks, it's just a broker between two people buying and selling advertisement-space/clicks. As long as the people buying advertisements get a high enough conversion (which they can already check themselves), this could go on indefinitly.
It would be relatively easy for Google to implement a payment-per-conversion system, however this would put a lot more risk on the person selling advertisement-space, thus it simply won't be used. Google knows this. You'd rather receive $10 a click a few hundred times a month than wait a whole year for someone to get a mortgage which might get you $10000 at once. Plus, there is the drawback of the buyer not playing fair (just remove the google-conversion-tracking bit from your system, and voila, you've earned yourself $10000 and the seller wouldn't know any better).
From what I've seen (I'm no expert on this), I'd say this system is probably even more robust than another famous broker: Ebay. As long as there are people wanting traffic via advertisements and there are people offering advertisements on their websites, Adsense will continue to exist. With Google laughing all the way to the bank.