One in a thousand society (99.9th, ~1520 on the SAT)
I think this one is a joke played by members of the Giga Society on their intellectual inferiors. If you look at the One In A Thousand Society's web page, you'll see that "membership" requires you to send $30 off to some random guy at a P.O. box in New York City. And doing that would constitute irrevocable evidence of being an idiot.
Slightly over-the-hill women from Thailand and Surinam stand in them wearing unflattering negligees and smoking mini-cigars. Packs of drunken English lager louts stumble by and dare the youngest, most naive lad among them to go inside, which he does. Fifteen minutes later he emerges, shellshocked and dead sober. When he gets home to Gormless Crescent he resolves never to drink with those boys again.
The full text of a 1980s Time Magazine article ought to be completely and correctly displayable anywhere text is displayed on a 21st Century computer, including the command line. For this, we need fonts such as this Gentium as standard.
Time makes liberal use of small caps, which Gentium doesn't have.
I have also had an issue where somebnodies sentence was repeated. the whole sentence, which was odd, and a reminder of how easy it would be for them to be digitally recording everything we said.
Considering the blackmail and other scams I have seen stem from overseas companies, I would be a little leary of what you say.
Yes, you could say the same thing about the US government, yadda yadda yadda, but in my securitty work, I have only seen overseas companies try to blackmail, never a US company or the US government
Consider for a moment how ridiculous that statement sounds to the hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers who live outside the USA - especially in northern European countries where corruption by any measure is far beneath American levels.
Just one question, has there been any work on a open standard yet?
Yes, it is substantially built on an open proposal, SPF. Sticking my finger to the wind, I am guessing that's what the IETF is going to go with anyway.
And that's pretty damn funny. Real life case at a place I once worked, there was 40 PCs deployed, and three Macs. Fully a quarter of the support tickets generated for the whole company came from the three Macs. I especially got a kick out of how often the graphics guy would curse that his Mac crashed on him - again! and he lost what he was working on.
Could be a useful tool though, I'd love to save car parking charges (place where I park sometimes uses magnetic cards):)
And I'd like to copy my ATM card's stripe over some old unused card like a library card from a city I don't live in anymore. Ought to add some useful security-through-obscurity to my wallet in case it's stolen. Who's going to stick a library card in an ATM?
Has anyone done this? What sort of equipment do I need to write to a card?
I just visited Singapore and those guys are like ten years into the future compared to us. Everything, and I mean everything, takes debit or credit cards.
From soda machines to subway ticket machines, etc.
Did you also notice the Coke machines that allow you to pay by mobile phone? There's a number written on the machine, you SMS it, they instantly SMS you back a code, and then you punch the code into the machine and get your drink. The price of the drink goes on your phone bill.
How about the bill-payment machines in the subway stations? Slide your phone bill, water bill, whatever through the machine, it OCRs them, shows you the total, then you stick in your debit/credit card and it pays the bills for you.
TAB is a special character. It is not printable, you need to convert it to a series of spaces to do that. Treating it as a character would mean inserting ONE item in the line, not a variable number depending on your current position.
By your logic, when someone inserts a carriage return, should we instead insert VT100 control sequences to move the cursor to the beginning of the next line and possibly scroll the screen up? Because that's the equivalent of indenting with spaces.
Tab is a control character that tells the output driver to do a specific thing: Move the cursor to the next tab stop. The implementation details of this process are unimportant at this level, and by mixing them in with the data stored in the file, you are creating confusion and dooming thousands more to have to put up with files full of those damnable spaces.
The answers to these problems are simple.
Anyone who uses an editor that inserts spaces when tab is pressed (unless this behavior can be, and is, turned off) shall be shot.
Anyone who presses the spacebar twice in succession in any context where the space characters will be stored in a file, shall be shot.
Anyone using a GUI editor that cannot display the difference between spaces and tabs, shall be shot.
A few simple rules and harmony is restored. A lot of idiors' corpses to clean up but them's the breaks.
Lots of programs already use TAB for something else, emacs is not the only one. Bash is another one. Any decent command-line interface now uses TAB for auto-completion.
So what? Regular expressions use question marks for special purposes. Does that mean we're not allowed to ask questions anymore. An editor is an editor, a shell is a shell. Nobody is using libreadline for a visual editor.
The farthest I've ever been from my house (east coast us) has been Thailand. If I remember, the internet coffee houses charged aroung $6 us dollars per 1/2 hour of connection time.
I'm posting from a net cafe in Thailand right now. 1 megabit DSL here, and I can feel it (it feels nice) when downloading.
Rate sheet for the place is right in front of me on the desk, so for the general info welfare I'll transcribe it:
I spent a glorious month backpacking through Thailand back in January. The country is quite wired, so I had the chance to check in from a number of cyber-cafes.
In that case you'll be pleased to hear that I'm posting from Buddy Internet Center in Chiang Mai this very moment, my stomach extremely full of spicy red chicken curry. Fastest connection I've had in months.
At a free computer in Narita Airport (waiting for a connecting flight). Apparently there was free WiFi too, but I didn't bring my laptop.
No free wifi as far as I can tell - on various layovers (most recently a couple months ago, but who knows what may have changed) I've prowled the place with stumbler running and every AP I get on requires a subscription.
Strangest thing is that there are free computers and must-pay computers scattered around the transit area, and often people will be using the must-pay computers while the free computers sit idle.
Malaysia is rather rabidly anti-western and anti-American.
Malaysia is no such thing. Some scraps of circumstantial evidence:
The Malaysian flag is an homage to the American flag.
1/4 of the programmes on TV come straight from the USA. This morning I was having breakfast at a little place down the street and everyone was watching WWF reruns on TV with rapt attention.
American music and movies completely rule their respective markets (though Chinese pop puts up a good struggle).
Malaysians cheerfully welcome westerners to the country.
Every day I see people (Malaysians, not tourists) walking around with obviously American t-shirts.
Malaysia makes an awful lot of money manufacturing high-tech goods for western companies and this is no secret to anybody.
A&W Root Beer restaurants are all over the place; every mug and promo paper boasts explicitly of the Americanness of the place and yet they're packed with Muslim families having dinner out.
You are probably confusing an entire country with a few zany speeches by former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir.
This would not happen in Japan, for instance.
It's come close to happening in a lot of western countries like, say, Germany.
Considering the pirates are buying their blank discs in MegaHyperHappy bulk, I'd think the profit margins on pirate CDs would be SuperHappyFunTimes. You can get a 100 pack of CD-R's off of Newegg for $20. That's $.20 a CD. A computer with a burner is a fixed cost that was most likely purchased long ago and has probably since been paid for with pirate CD revenue. Selling each one for $1.25 gives you an awesome 525% return on your investment, minus bandwidth costs.
You're leaving out a lot of costs. They are paying as much rent as the equally-sized legit store next door, and they have as many staff. These costs spread pretty thick on a retail unit price of $1.25.
What success? And how old is that article? 5 years?
Last I heard they had decided it was going to be the biotechnology supercorridor instead, as soon as they could come up with a way to keep the same acronym so they wouldn't have to change the signs. Welcome to Biojaya, garden city. Don't eat the hyperintelligent coconuts; we need them to do our urban planning.
And three years from now it will be the Fuel Cell Supercorridor, or whatever the fad du jour is.
The US government pays businesses a ton of money to write software. I currently work with such a company. If the US government decided to use all Open Source a lot of people would be out of work.
If the work is useful, it is unique and/or custom. And open source offers more opportunities for customization than closed-source anyway.
The Malaysian government choosing to use Open Source has just reduced the amount of money that will go to businesses and therefore employees. Which means lost jobs and/or fewer people being hired on.
It seems like you are arguing in favor of specialized welfare programs for computer programmers who don't otherwise offer any value to the market.
Otherwise there's no possible reason to write the same things over and over and over again. It's like having every agency in the government outsource their own national census.
As far as making a real dent in software sales there... well, let's just say that I went to four or five different malls in Malaysia when I was there and not once did I see any legit software offered.
Not sure when you were here, but I don't know of any malls where you can't buy legit software (okay, at Plaza Imbi, you have to look hard).
At the big computer malls (an Asian phenomenon not seen in North America, and no, Fry's ain't shit in comparison) in Malaysia there will usually be a couple dozen very in-your-face places selling a few hundred different packages for a flat rate of RM5 (US$1.25) per CD (which results in the funny situation that Linux costs more than Windows). Some of them are set up on tables in the halls but many of them are clearly leaseholders with proper shops. Occasionally there will be a "legit" side-business (selling mobile phone accessories or something) but usually they don't even bother.
Side-by-side with them are respectable shops selling shrink-wrap software. I do see them making sales, so some people clearly either buy the moral argument, or they see a value in getting the manuals and support. The margins on the pirate CDs must be tiny, so at the end of the day the legit vendors may still be more profitable.
Yesterday up on the 3rd floor in Low Yat Plaza (where I was buying a USB hub, thank you very much), right alongside the pirate stalls, I saw a 1.5-meter-tall stand-up display in the corridor advertising the benefits of purchasing legal Microsoft software. So obviously someone's been through there.
On the main topic of this article, I must say it takes me quite by surprise, because I really don't see much Linux at all in Malaysia compared to neighboring countries (including equally piracy-agnostic Thailand). Maybe Bill Gates committed some egregious cultural faux pas while he was here last week (Offered the PM's wife a swig of brandy? Used his turn signal?).
Your firewall blocks traffic from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.1? You're hard core, man.
Mine? No. The tons of people that get completely locked down when another./er shows up and blocks everything? Yes. The simple reality is that lots of people are starting to block absolutely everything in order to prevent infection.
Maybe I'm just naïve, but I don't think anyone actually does that. Seems like it would break an awful lot of things, and not solve any problems.
Besides, if the app is a simple one, but needs to be secure, avoiding sending packets at all is a good thing and avoiding having to install a web server makes for a simpler install.
If your machine "sends" localhost packets anywhere, then your troubles may be bigger than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Slightly over-the-hill women from Thailand and Surinam stand in them wearing unflattering negligees and smoking mini-cigars. Packs of drunken English lager louts stumble by and dare the youngest, most naive lad among them to go inside, which he does. Fifteen minutes later he emerges, shellshocked and dead sober. When he gets home to Gormless Crescent he resolves never to drink with those boys again.
Haven't you heard? It is. Knock yerself out, post a picture of the bodies.
Time makes liberal use of small caps, which Gentium doesn't have.
Wouldn't "very nice" be a 6-month vacation? 2 weeks is barely long enough to stop instinctively waking up at 6 every morning.
It is, in fact, moderately helpful for there to be food in Iraq.
Consider for a moment how ridiculous that statement sounds to the hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers who live outside the USA - especially in northern European countries where corruption by any measure is far beneath American levels.
Yes, it is substantially built on an open proposal, SPF. Sticking my finger to the wind, I am guessing that's what the IETF is going to go with anyway.
And was he running OSX? Be honest, now.
And I'd like to copy my ATM card's stripe over some old unused card like a library card from a city I don't live in anymore. Ought to add some useful security-through-obscurity to my wallet in case it's stolen. Who's going to stick a library card in an ATM?
Has anyone done this? What sort of equipment do I need to write to a card?
Did you also notice the Coke machines that allow you to pay by mobile phone? There's a number written on the machine, you SMS it, they instantly SMS you back a code, and then you punch the code into the machine and get your drink. The price of the drink goes on your phone bill.
How about the bill-payment machines in the subway stations? Slide your phone bill, water bill, whatever through the machine, it OCRs them, shows you the total, then you stick in your debit/credit card and it pays the bills for you.
By your logic, when someone inserts a carriage return, should we instead insert VT100 control sequences to move the cursor to the beginning of the next line and possibly scroll the screen up? Because that's the equivalent of indenting with spaces.
Tab is a control character that tells the output driver to do a specific thing: Move the cursor to the next tab stop. The implementation details of this process are unimportant at this level, and by mixing them in with the data stored in the file, you are creating confusion and dooming thousands more to have to put up with files full of those damnable spaces.
The answers to these problems are simple.
Anyone who uses an editor that inserts spaces when tab is pressed (unless this behavior can be, and is, turned off) shall be shot.
Anyone who presses the spacebar twice in succession in any context where the space characters will be stored in a file, shall be shot.
Anyone using a GUI editor that cannot display the difference between spaces and tabs, shall be shot.
A few simple rules and harmony is restored. A lot of idiors' corpses to clean up but them's the breaks.
So what? Regular expressions use question marks for special purposes. Does that mean we're not allowed to ask questions anymore. An editor is an editor, a shell is a shell. Nobody is using libreadline for a visual editor.
I'm posting from a net cafe in Thailand right now. 1 megabit DSL here, and I can feel it (it feels nice) when downloading.
Rate sheet for the place is right in front of me on the desk, so for the general info welfare I'll transcribe it:
1-20 minutes: 10 baht (US$0.25)
21-60 minutes: 20 baht (US$0.50)
60-120 minutes: 30 baht (US$0.75)
Can't complain about them rates. If you paid $6 you wuz skrude.
In that case you'll be pleased to hear that I'm posting from Buddy Internet Center in Chiang Mai this very moment, my stomach extremely full of spicy red chicken curry. Fastest connection I've had in months.
No free wifi as far as I can tell - on various layovers (most recently a couple months ago, but who knows what may have changed) I've prowled the place with stumbler running and every AP I get on requires a subscription.
Strangest thing is that there are free computers and must-pay computers scattered around the transit area, and often people will be using the must-pay computers while the free computers sit idle.
Malaysia is no such thing. Some scraps of circumstantial evidence:
You are probably confusing an entire country with a few zany speeches by former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir.
It's come close to happening in a lot of western countries like, say, Germany.
You're leaving out a lot of costs. They are paying as much rent as the equally-sized legit store next door, and they have as many staff. These costs spread pretty thick on a retail unit price of $1.25.
What success? And how old is that article? 5 years?
Last I heard they had decided it was going to be the biotechnology supercorridor instead, as soon as they could come up with a way to keep the same acronym so they wouldn't have to change the signs. Welcome to Biojaya, garden city. Don't eat the hyperintelligent coconuts; we need them to do our urban planning.
And three years from now it will be the Fuel Cell Supercorridor, or whatever the fad du jour is.
If the work is useful, it is unique and/or custom. And open source offers more opportunities for customization than closed-source anyway.
It seems like you are arguing in favor of specialized welfare programs for computer programmers who don't otherwise offer any value to the market.
Otherwise there's no possible reason to write the same things over and over and over again. It's like having every agency in the government outsource their own national census.
Not sure when you were here, but I don't know of any malls where you can't buy legit software (okay, at Plaza Imbi, you have to look hard).
At the big computer malls (an Asian phenomenon not seen in North America, and no, Fry's ain't shit in comparison) in Malaysia there will usually be a couple dozen very in-your-face places selling a few hundred different packages for a flat rate of RM5 (US$1.25) per CD (which results in the funny situation that Linux costs more than Windows). Some of them are set up on tables in the halls but many of them are clearly leaseholders with proper shops. Occasionally there will be a "legit" side-business (selling mobile phone accessories or something) but usually they don't even bother.
Side-by-side with them are respectable shops selling shrink-wrap software. I do see them making sales, so some people clearly either buy the moral argument, or they see a value in getting the manuals and support. The margins on the pirate CDs must be tiny, so at the end of the day the legit vendors may still be more profitable.
Yesterday up on the 3rd floor in Low Yat Plaza (where I was buying a USB hub, thank you very much), right alongside the pirate stalls, I saw a 1.5-meter-tall stand-up display in the corridor advertising the benefits of purchasing legal Microsoft software. So obviously someone's been through there.
On the main topic of this article, I must say it takes me quite by surprise, because I really don't see much Linux at all in Malaysia compared to neighboring countries (including equally piracy-agnostic Thailand). Maybe Bill Gates committed some egregious cultural faux pas while he was here last week (Offered the PM's wife a swig of brandy? Used his turn signal?).
Maybe I'm just naïve, but I don't think anyone actually does that. Seems like it would break an awful lot of things, and not solve any problems.
If your machine "sends" localhost packets anywhere, then your troubles may be bigger than you think.
Don't be ridiculous.
Follow the money and the conclusion is clear: Japanese schoolchildren are about go to on sale at Walmart.
Your firewall blocks traffic from 127.0.0.1 to 127.0.0.1? You're hard core, man.
No, your methodology is inherently flawed: Linux users already know all the URLs, so they don't use Google.
Search engines are for knock-kneed ninnies with no memorization skills.
Go ahead, ask me anything. I'll tell you what page it's on.
Poor, naive Caldair.
Unless you can subsist on waffles and olives 3 meals a day, that is.
Shopping for edible food in Belgium is like shopping for elephants in Wisconsin.