At university, a few friends and I spent most of a week in a particular terminal room with no windows or natural light, without any sleep. We had left a six-month group project until the week before.
As I remember it (it's pretty hazy!) we washed Pro-Plus tablets down with a lot of coffee, Coke, Red Bull, etc. I think we were awake for over four days continuously. One of my friends finally went to sleep in an armchair in the common room opposite, just before the deadline. We failed to wake him, even by slapping him. Sometime during the last day, I started shouting rather than speaking, though I wasn't aware of it.
Believe it or not, we got a passing grade. I have absolutely no recollection of the quality of the code.
There's one strange phenomenon I experience after a lot of coding: it feels like my hands are connected directly to my shoulders, and my eyes seem to zoom in so the screen fills my vision. I code faster and better, but it's really weird. Does anyone else get this?
David [...] targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day. [...] "It was radioactive as heck," he says. "The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent."
Although I agree it's not really a reactor, it sounds like he managed to do more than isolate a bunch of radioactive waste.
Classic Darwin Award material (or at least honorable mention): combines intelligence, ignorance and ingenuity at an early age.
According to imdb, he did do the voice. He was only required on set as a consultant to fill in the voice of Yoda he did (before or after) in the recording studio for the benefit of the real life actors.
The imdb trivia entry is misleading... the full cast list clarifies it.
I think I'm reasonably safe from being hit in the face with a big fish when I leave my house... not because it's not possible, but because it's not likely.
For now, Macs are safer because there are fewer viruses around. We'll see when/if virus writers start targeting Mac OS X as much as Windows.
Sorry.. didn't make it clear. I put *all* major applications/packages where I track multiple versions (eg. Apache, Perl, Sendmail/Postfix, MySQL, PHP, prc-tools, GD, etc., etc.) in/app, allowing me to build and test newer versions without overwriting the current "approved" version.
Because I manage/app in a different way, I avoid/usr/local for packages that I track. Throwaway, uncustomised packages (eg. zip, word2x) which I'm unlikely to ever get round to upgrading just go in/usr/local as usual.
I tend to also keep the configure parameters and also config files in CVS.
Sounds like a lot of work, but worth it. The number of production boxes I've used (that others have set up) where different versions of things are spread around everywhere has made me reasonably tidy and regimented when setting up a production box.
I guess it's like/opt on other Unices, but since there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the correct structure of/opt, I avoid that name to prevent confusion when new sysadmins come on board.
This is great! First thing I do with my nice FreeBSD installs is remake world with NO_BIND, NO_SENDMAIL and NO_PERL. The other thing I'd like is separate packaging of all ports in their own directories in, say,/app.
That way you can have more than one version installed, and symlink/app/perl (ie. current) to/app/perl-x.y.z
I'd like to see *all* parts of FreeBSD (incl. kernel, etc.) represented as pseudo-ports/packages in the package database to ease componentized installation (eg. no 'gcc' for client machines) and simple networked FS management.
I use things like Perl all the time, but I'd like the control of which Perl, which GCC, etc.
Acorn Nut device: As should be clear from the preceding text, I consider this to be one of the very best corporate logos ever seen.
Acorn seemed to be pretty bad at branding, IMHO... the true Acorn Green wasn't in the usual phosphor or LCD gamuts, and so wasn't accurately displayable on *any* of their computers. Even the Archimedes logo's blue wasn't in the gamut and ended up looking washed out.
RISCOS Ltd don't seem much better at good brand design...
Back when I was a student, and couldn't afford a TV Licence, I got a visit from a TV Licencing officer. I told him the truth and said I had just got the TV, and was saving up for a licence. He replied "well, okay, but mind that you do!"
I took the opportunity to ask him what they could do about PC TV cards, and also RGB monitors tied to VCRs (ie. no live display)
He said "Dunno, but I'd expect we wouldn't have an f'in clue!"
Digressing even further... a few years earlier my mother had tried to get a refund out of TV Licencing due to their mistaken records and had failed to get a reply. So, living in Bristol, home of TVL HQ, I doorstepped them. Managed to get a handwritten cheque out of them on the spot by sitting in the lobby for about two hours until someone came to speak to me. =)
I used to think the TV Licence was worth it, but now that the BBC are spending the money on crappy idents, silly DOGs and "The Tweenies", I'm starting to think switching to an opt-in BBC Subscription when the analogue switchoff comes is a good idea.
By far the best internet cafe I've been to is one in Cambridge, UK, called CB1.
The reason it was great is that it was a viable business as a cafe, as a second-hand bookshop and as an internet access point, or ANY SINGLE ONE of those.
In fact, the computers almost seemed like an afterthought. The first day I went there, I was greeted by the proprietor behind the bar with a smile and friendly conversation, with no pressure to buy coffee, books or internet time. I stayed for hours, and came back the next day (and the day after, etc.)
I ended up spending most of my summer holiday hanging out there, getting to know the regulars, helping out with all the newbies, playing chess and reading the daily newspaper freely supplied.
A number of the regulars were reasonably big names in the Cambridge internet community, who just found this place to hang out at, where they could check their email occasionally, just in case.
We were all techie types, attracted initially by the internet connectivity (this was back in 1995!), but kept there by the friendly atmosphere. Think of it like 'Central Perk' on 'Friends'.
From what Dan (the proprietor) said, the business was profitable from day one.
In comparison, the worst types of internet cafe are the heavily chromed and exposed cable ducting places like Cyberia, which were sterile, unfriendly places.
I don't think you can make money from internet connectivity alone, but treat it as an added feature to an already viable friendly meeting place and cafe, and you're onto a winner.
There's two NatWest ATMs round the corner from my house (NatWest is a major UK bank).
A few years ago, I walked past them to see one of them with a 'Green Screen Of Death' -- a real NT BSOD through one of those little green screens. The other one had a fairly normal NT desktop, with an empty 'CMD.EXE' box in the middle of the screen.
I went round the corner to the Barclays ATM instead.
Also, the new display screens at my local train station have shown everything from 'AMI BIOS' and a BSOD to a big fat nothing.
WHY don't these particular software engineers realise Windows is a bad choice for standalone unattended apps?
Re:I am partially made of Titanium
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 2
I've got a bloody great titanium scaffold bolted to my spine. My surgeon took out six cartilage discs, chopped up two of my ribs, put the rib bits between my vertebrae, drilled seven titanium bolts into the vertebrae and threaded titanium cable through the heads of the bolts.
As a result of using titanium, it doesn't set off alarms in airports, etc!
Incidentally, my parents have palladium wedding rings, as it was the subject of my dad's doctorate. Knowing my dad, I wouldn't be surprised if he hasn't dunked his hand in heavy water...
SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created
I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.
It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.
For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:
Point 0: 0x00000064, 0x00000064
Point 1: 0x00000064, 0x00000000
Point 2: 0x00000000, 0x00000064
Point 3: 0xffffff9c, 0x00000000
Point 4: 0x00000000, 0xffffff9c
Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.
Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.
As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.
The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.
Not really.. I'm worried that a company with a lot of money will start pumping out high-profile high-budget games which are most likely not as enjoyable as the hobbyist/sole-trader developed games.
If that happens, I suspect a lot of users will be wowed by the glitz of the big games and spend their money that way, even though the smaller games are probably better thought out and more fun.
High budget doesn't necessarily mean *good*, but many users will perceive it that way, and might ignore the lower profile low-budget games.
I think of it like the difference between Hollywood and independent films.
Of course, Sega have the right to enter this market. I wouldn't ever want otherwise. That doesn't mean I'm going to personally enjoy it, though.
I have the same opinion about the X-Box. I applaud the fact that Microsoft *can* enter that niche, but it still annoys me. I hate it when they find a way to make more money and get more power.
Oh, and from what I see of their demos, I don't think my game's going to look crap in comparison!
Incidentally, is Smilebit still part of Sega? If not, is Sega acting as publisher and Smilebit as developer? Having a high-profile publisher for Palm could be handy.
This is what I've been dreading for ages -- a big player in the Palm Game cottage industry. The thing about Palm development is that it's nice and friendly, but it's not *too* capable.
As a result, some teenager in his garage can write the best software. It's like back in the eighties when ten-year-olds would be writing assembly code and games were *playable* rather than *pretty*. It's an area of the software industry that throwing money at the task won't help.
I've been writing a pretty large scale Palm game on my own for the past six months, and it's still a long way from completion. I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
Sorry about the unstructured rant, but I'm just annoyed now.
First thing I did when I took over responsibility for hosting and internet connectivity at a (largish) company I worked at was to replace their existing public IP space (a few thousand addresses) with private IP, hidden behind NAT. It made internal routing *far* easier.
Of course, a few hardcore techies complained. So, I said that if they had a problem with it, they could come tell me why. If they had a good reason for public IP and they convinced me they were trustable as far as security was concerned, I'd happily give them as many of the deallocated public addresses as they needed, and noted them down carefully. After a few months, those allocations would be reassessed.
As far as HP is concerned, something like:
find . -exec perl -pi -e 's/15\.(\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/10.$1/go' should do the trick! =)
Hewlett Packard have (among other class B and C blocks), the 15/8 network. That's 15.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255.
In their corporate manifesto, the "HP Way", they claim "citizenship" and contribution to the communities they operate in to be one of their seven most important corporate objectives.
They operate in the Internet community, yet claim 16 million addresses for themselves, even though practically all of their internal machines are hidden behind a solid firewall system for which NAT would not be a big problem (and possibly a security asset.)
I know it'd be a big job to fix, but it still doesn't seem to be good citizenship to me.
where you place it in a cartridge before you put it in the player.
Not necessarily... I used to have a Panasonic laptop with an internal PD drive. (It was really cool -- on eject, the keyboard would lift up and the tray would come out)
This format was caddied (you couldn't easily remove the disc from the caddy), but the tray also took uncaddied CD-ROMs.
I'm all for caddies/cartridges. Much easier to handle, and keeps the disc clean and scratch-free. If done properly, they could make caddies that doubled as cases. You'd buy the caddy with a cardboard sleeve, rather than an Amaray case.
I can't remember who, but someone suggested killing two birds with one stone: when the British government is slaughtering herds/flocks/whatever of cows/sheep/whatever for possibility of BSE/Foot-n-Mouth/whatever, just get them to send the animals to graze in a minefield, instead =)
(incidentally, banning particular referrers at the server isn't enough, as the incoming connections would be enough to slashdot a server. It'd have to be done in the Slashdot submission script)
How about a CVS tree that the small 'core team' (ie. subsystem maintainers, etc.) work on? They would liaise correctly, and build this kernel tree based on incoming patches.
Then, reasonably regularly, they freeze this tree, test, fix, test, fix, test, fix, test. This 'release' is then diffed against Linus's current published version, brought up-to-date, and then sent to Linus as a consolidated, well-documented (from the CVS logs) patch.
Linus can then integrate that however he wants and release. The patch would describe accurately to Linus which bits he can feed in untouched (isolated subsystem changes) and bits that he wants to look at. Alternatively, Linus could treat his version as CVS vendor-based modifications... as could IBM, Oracle, etc.
The wider community then has read access to the 'Linus submission candidate' tree (ie. this tree being built by the core team) to do patches against. This would mean that everyone is on the same page, and can 'funnel' changes to Linus, thereby reducing the huge number of contradictory outdated patches landing on his lap.
In time, Linus may feel he trusts the quality of the consolidated patches well enough to just join the core team and sod his version, causing a FreeBSD-like core team-based organisation.
I'd like to see Linus and (say) Jordan Hubbard have a chat and compare notes of what life's like at the top... both models have pro's and con's. If you could force Theo to sit and listen, it might help too;-)
(Incidentally, I don't really track Linux development any more than reactionary Slashdot comments, so I bet this solution has already been discussed. However, I *do* know that I've been avoiding Linux since about 1996 mainly due to this eggs-in-one-basket problem. I trust the FreeBSD core-team/CURRENT/STABLE/RELEASE procedure a whole lot more!)
Slashdot Mirror
At university, a few friends and I spent most of a week in a particular terminal room with no windows or natural light, without any sleep. We had left a six-month group project until the week before.
As I remember it (it's pretty hazy!) we washed Pro-Plus tablets down with a lot of coffee, Coke, Red Bull, etc. I think we were awake for over four days continuously. One of my friends finally went to sleep in an armchair in the common room opposite, just before the deadline. We failed to wake him, even by slapping him. Sometime during the last day, I started shouting rather than speaking, though I wasn't aware of it.
Believe it or not, we got a passing grade. I have absolutely no recollection of the quality of the code.
There's one strange phenomenon I experience after a lot of coding: it feels like my hands are connected directly to my shoulders, and my eyes seem to zoom in so the screen fills my vision. I code faster and better, but it's really weird. Does anyone else get this?
From the article:
Although I agree it's not really a reactor, it sounds like he managed to do more than isolate a bunch of radioactive waste.
Classic Darwin Award material (or at least honorable mention): combines intelligence, ignorance and ingenuity at an early age.
According to imdb, he did do the voice. He was only required on set as a consultant to fill in the voice of Yoda he did (before or after) in the recording studio for the benefit of the real life actors.
The imdb trivia entry is misleading... the full cast list clarifies it.
I think I'm reasonably safe from being hit in the face with a big fish when I leave my house... not because it's not possible, but because it's not likely.
For now, Macs are safer because there are fewer viruses around. We'll see when/if virus writers start targeting Mac OS X as much as Windows.
I suspect even then, Mac users will be safer.
Looks like antivirus publishers run amok.
Sorry.. didn't make it clear. I put *all* major applications/packages where I track multiple versions (eg. Apache, Perl, Sendmail/Postfix, MySQL, PHP, prc-tools, GD, etc., etc.) in /app, allowing me to build and test newer versions without overwriting the current "approved" version.
/app in a different way, I avoid /usr/local for packages that I track. Throwaway, uncustomised packages (eg. zip, word2x) which I'm unlikely to ever get round to upgrading just go in /usr/local as usual.
/opt on other Unices, but since there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the correct structure of /opt, I avoid that name to prevent confusion when new sysadmins come on board.
Because I manage
/app/pkg (package installs)
/app/src (source)
/app/etc (package configs)
/app/var (logs, etc)
I tend to also keep the configure parameters and also config files in CVS.
Sounds like a lot of work, but worth it. The number of production boxes I've used (that others have set up) where different versions of things are spread around everywhere has made me reasonably tidy and regimented when setting up a production box.
I guess it's like
This is great! First thing I do with my nice FreeBSD installs is remake world with NO_BIND, NO_SENDMAIL and NO_PERL. The other thing I'd like is separate packaging of all ports in their own directories in, say, /app.
/app/perl (ie. current) to /app/perl-x.y.z
That way you can have more than one version installed, and symlink
I'd like to see *all* parts of FreeBSD (incl. kernel, etc.) represented as pseudo-ports/packages in the package database to ease componentized installation (eg. no 'gcc' for client machines) and simple networked FS management.
I use things like Perl all the time, but I'd like the control of which Perl, which GCC, etc.
From the page you refer to:
Acorn seemed to be pretty bad at branding, IMHO... the true Acorn Green wasn't in the usual phosphor or LCD gamuts, and so wasn't accurately displayable on *any* of their computers. Even the Archimedes logo's blue wasn't in the gamut and ended up looking washed out.
RISCOS Ltd don't seem much better at good brand design...
Why bother calling it 'Windows' anymore? Seems that 'Microsoft Window' might be a better name...
Back when I was a student, and couldn't afford a TV Licence, I got a visit from a TV Licencing officer. I told him the truth and said I had just got the TV, and was saving up for a licence. He replied "well, okay, but mind that you do!"
I took the opportunity to ask him what they could do about PC TV cards, and also RGB monitors tied to VCRs (ie. no live display)
He said "Dunno, but I'd expect we wouldn't have an f'in clue!"
Digressing even further... a few years earlier my mother had tried to get a refund out of TV Licencing due to their mistaken records and had failed to get a reply. So, living in Bristol, home of TVL HQ, I doorstepped them. Managed to get a handwritten cheque out of them on the spot by sitting in the lobby for about two hours until someone came to speak to me. =)
I used to think the TV Licence was worth it, but now that the BBC are spending the money on crappy idents, silly DOGs and "The Tweenies", I'm starting to think switching to an opt-in BBC Subscription when the analogue switchoff comes is a good idea.
By far the best internet cafe I've been to is one in Cambridge, UK, called CB1.
The reason it was great is that it was a viable business as a cafe, as a second-hand bookshop and as an internet access point, or ANY SINGLE ONE of those.
In fact, the computers almost seemed like an afterthought. The first day I went there, I was greeted by the proprietor behind the bar with a smile and friendly conversation, with no pressure to buy coffee, books or internet time. I stayed for hours, and came back the next day (and the day after, etc.)
I ended up spending most of my summer holiday hanging out there, getting to know the regulars, helping out with all the newbies, playing chess and reading the daily newspaper freely supplied.
A number of the regulars were reasonably big names in the Cambridge internet community, who just found this place to hang out at, where they could check their email occasionally, just in case.
We were all techie types, attracted initially by the internet connectivity (this was back in 1995!), but kept there by the friendly atmosphere. Think of it like 'Central Perk' on 'Friends'.
From what Dan (the proprietor) said, the business was profitable from day one.
In comparison, the worst types of internet cafe are the heavily chromed and exposed cable ducting places like Cyberia, which were sterile, unfriendly places.
I don't think you can make money from internet connectivity alone, but treat it as an added feature to an already viable friendly meeting place and cafe, and you're onto a winner.
There's two NatWest ATMs round the corner from my house (NatWest is a major UK bank).
A few years ago, I walked past them to see one of them with a 'Green Screen Of Death' -- a real NT BSOD through one of those little green screens. The other one had a fairly normal NT desktop, with an empty 'CMD.EXE' box in the middle of the screen.
I went round the corner to the Barclays ATM instead.
Also, the new display screens at my local train station have shown everything from 'AMI BIOS' and a BSOD to a big fat nothing.
WHY don't these particular software engineers realise Windows is a bad choice for standalone unattended apps?
I've got a bloody great titanium scaffold bolted to my spine. My surgeon took out six cartilage discs, chopped up two of my ribs, put the rib bits between my vertebrae, drilled seven titanium bolts into the vertebrae and threaded titanium cable through the heads of the bolts.
As a result of using titanium, it doesn't set off alarms in airports, etc!
Incidentally, my parents have palladium wedding rings, as it was the subject of my dad's doctorate. Knowing my dad, I wouldn't be surprised if he hasn't dunked his hand in heavy water...
I beg to differ. I personally think it's a real shame the Flare file format didn't gain widespread acceptance.
It does really smart things to aid compression, such as interleaving 4-byte relative coordinates. A path is defined by an absolute origin, followed by relative coordinates for the rest of the path. These are then interleaved in XXYYXXYYXXYYXXYY format.
For example, a square, x0=100 y0=100 x1=200 y1=200:
Flare has a 'Start GZ Compression' tag, and that stream of bytes compresses *really* well.
Since Flare is such a rich tagged format, there's already a 'Square' tag, which is just a specific case of n-sided polygon. You can also embed (un-gzipped) JPEG data, and a huge bunch of transparency and fill options.
As far as ease of programming is concerned, I wrote a simple Flare InputStream/OutputStream pair in Java in about half a day with no previous knowledge of the format, and a wireframe displayer using Java2D in about an hour. The spec was clear and easy to understand.
Unfortunately, the side-by-side comparisons Xara had aren't available any more, but they were stunning. A ~50K JPEG rendered logo from NBC's homepage was redrawn using Flare in about 5K, and (although different due to the artist's skills) was of the same visual quality, if not better.
The Flare files on the Xara gallery have been sadly removed, but you can see how rich the format is from some of the samples: Microscope, Watch. I seem to remember these were less than 100K Flare files.
Not really.. I'm worried that a company with a lot of money will start pumping out high-profile high-budget games which are most likely not as enjoyable as the hobbyist/sole-trader developed games.
If that happens, I suspect a lot of users will be wowed by the glitz of the big games and spend their money that way, even though the smaller games are probably better thought out and more fun.
High budget doesn't necessarily mean *good*, but many users will perceive it that way, and might ignore the lower profile low-budget games.
I think of it like the difference between Hollywood and independent films.
Of course, Sega have the right to enter this market. I wouldn't ever want otherwise. That doesn't mean I'm going to personally enjoy it, though.
I have the same opinion about the X-Box. I applaud the fact that Microsoft *can* enter that niche, but it still annoys me. I hate it when they find a way to make more money and get more power.
Oh, and from what I see of their demos, I don't think my game's going to look crap in comparison!
Incidentally, is Smilebit still part of Sega? If not, is Sega acting as publisher and Smilebit as developer? Having a high-profile publisher for Palm could be handy.
This is what I've been dreading for ages -- a big player in the Palm Game cottage industry. The thing about Palm development is that it's nice and friendly, but it's not *too* capable.
As a result, some teenager in his garage can write the best software. It's like back in the eighties when ten-year-olds would be writing assembly code and games were *playable* rather than *pretty*. It's an area of the software industry that throwing money at the task won't help.
I've been writing a pretty large scale Palm game on my own for the past six months, and it's still a long way from completion. I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
Sorry about the unstructured rant, but I'm just annoyed now.
... hopefully accompanied by a massive thud as all those flying Windows XP people drop from the sky.
500,000 *BARELY USED* Wireless GPS PDAs
Item # 112371802498652
Currently US $10.00
First bid US $1.00
Quantity 500,000
# of bids 27
Time left 7 days, 14 hours +
Location Washington DC 20233
Started Apr-02-10 19:24:52 PST
=)
First thing I did when I took over responsibility for hosting and internet connectivity at a (largish) company I worked at was to replace their existing public IP space (a few thousand addresses) with private IP, hidden behind NAT. It made internal routing *far* easier.
Of course, a few hardcore techies complained. So, I said that if they had a problem with it, they could come tell me why. If they had a good reason for public IP and they convinced me they were trustable as far as security was concerned, I'd happily give them as many of the deallocated public addresses as they needed, and noted them down carefully. After a few months, those allocations would be reassessed.
As far as HP is concerned, something like:
find . -exec perl -pi -e 's/15\.(\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/10.$1/go'
should do the trick! =)
Hewlett Packard have (among other class B and C blocks), the 15/8 network. That's 15.0.0.0 - 15.255.255.255.
In their corporate manifesto, the "HP Way", they claim "citizenship" and contribution to the communities they operate in to be one of their seven most important corporate objectives.
They operate in the Internet community, yet claim 16 million addresses for themselves, even though practically all of their internal machines are hidden behind a solid firewall system for which NAT would not be a big problem (and possibly a security asset.)
I know it'd be a big job to fix, but it still doesn't seem to be good citizenship to me.
Not necessarily... I used to have a Panasonic laptop with an internal PD drive. (It was really cool -- on eject, the keyboard would lift up and the tray would come out)
This format was caddied (you couldn't easily remove the disc from the caddy), but the tray also took uncaddied CD-ROMs.
I'm all for caddies/cartridges. Much easier to handle, and keeps the disc clean and scratch-free. If done properly, they could make caddies that doubled as cases. You'd buy the caddy with a cardboard sleeve, rather than an Amaray case.
I can't remember who, but someone suggested killing two birds with one stone: when the British government is slaughtering herds/flocks/whatever of cows/sheep/whatever for possibility of BSE/Foot-n-Mouth/whatever, just get them to send the animals to graze in a minefield, instead =)
Going drastically off-topic here, but widespread biometric identification scares me...
Good old-fashioned mugging where all you lose is your wallet will evolve into kidnapping when they drag you kicking and screaming to the nearest ATM.
...or get Slashdot to honour a META tag at the destination of any remote links submitted:
e " CONTENT="1000000 hits">
<META NAME="PleaseDon'tLinkToMeIfYourDailyHitRateIsAbov
=)
(incidentally, banning particular referrers at the server isn't enough, as the incoming connections would be enough to slashdot a server. It'd have to be done in the Slashdot submission script)
OR...
;-)
How about a CVS tree that the small 'core team' (ie. subsystem maintainers, etc.) work on? They would liaise correctly, and build this kernel tree based on incoming patches.
Then, reasonably regularly, they freeze this tree, test, fix, test, fix, test, fix, test. This 'release' is then diffed against Linus's current published version, brought up-to-date, and then sent to Linus as a consolidated, well-documented (from the CVS logs) patch.
Linus can then integrate that however he wants and release. The patch would describe accurately to Linus which bits he can feed in untouched (isolated subsystem changes) and bits that he wants to look at. Alternatively, Linus could treat his version as CVS vendor-based modifications... as could IBM, Oracle, etc.
The wider community then has read access to the 'Linus submission candidate' tree (ie. this tree being built by the core team) to do patches against. This would mean that everyone is on the same page, and can 'funnel' changes to Linus, thereby reducing the huge number of contradictory outdated patches landing on his lap.
In time, Linus may feel he trusts the quality of the consolidated patches well enough to just join the core team and sod his version, causing a FreeBSD-like core team-based organisation.
I'd like to see Linus and (say) Jordan Hubbard have a chat and compare notes of what life's like at the top... both models have pro's and con's. If you could force Theo to sit and listen, it might help too
(Incidentally, I don't really track Linux development any more than reactionary Slashdot comments, so I bet this solution has already been discussed. However, I *do* know that I've been avoiding Linux since about 1996 mainly due to this eggs-in-one-basket problem. I trust the FreeBSD core-team/CURRENT/STABLE/RELEASE procedure a whole lot more!)