...and it's called the European Commission. It's no wonder so many people in EU nations hate the concept of the EU -- its executive branch is made up of officials that A) Aren't elected, B) Can pass legislature on their own as if they WERE the legislature -- and instead it's the legislature's job to vote DOWN European Commission directives! (se e the whole software patent case where the EU Parliament saved our butts repeatedly)
The whole EU model needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. =/ Either have an elected presidency or a prime minister or SOMETHING as the executive branch......not a bunch of oligarchs.
You implied that everything was okay because while the sites rah rahing the terrorists were down, Al Jazeera was still around. Either you were implying that they were part of the same group, with Al Jazeera simply being a "milder" form that counted as "free speech", or you did understand the nature of Al Jazeera and your statement was just nonsensical.
Imagine for a moment a mirror universe where the middle easterners had far more control over the internet and had the power to shut down western websites that were rahrahing westerners blowing things up in the middle east. That would be like saying "It's okay that they shut down Fox News, because free-speech sites like Pacifica Radio (the only extreme-liberal broadcaster I can think of in the U.S. on short notice) are still up!"
It makes zero sense because the two sites have nothing to do with eachother, aside from being run by people of the same ethnicity.
If you were suddenly confronted by a group of men brandishing guns, wouldn't your first thought be to get away? Especially if they were shouting at you in a foreign language?
These were not regular police officers in uniform, and they were understandably worried and probably as a result weren't as clear about who they were.
I wouldn't be surprised if in his panic he thought *THEY* were terrorists.
The irony is, apparently he wore the clothing to cover his equipment because he was afraid people would be suspicious of all the wires and such he was carrying (those being the tools of his electrician trade).
Why do so many westerners completely fail to understand the nature of Al Jazeera? Study for a bit! Al Jazeera is run by flaming liberal (at least by Arabic standards) journalists who would be the first against the wall if the jihadists took over!
They give the jihadists coverage in the same way the liberal ACLU defends conservative white supremacists -- they see themselves as giving a voice to dissent, even if the group they're giving a voice to hates their guts.
Believe me, nobody at Al Jazeera actually wants the ultraconservative jihadists in power. It would mean the end of Al Jazeera.
In fact, I usually give/home an entire drive to itself. Sometimes I put/var or at the very least/var/spool on a partition on that drive as well, other times I'll put it on an older, smaller drive since/var doesn't usually have to be super fast (mostly very small accesses -- if you have an old 10,000 rpm SCSI drive it can be very useful for this purpose -- it benefits more from seek time than media transfer rate).
And invariably/home fills to the brim and gets all ugly and fragmented as I struggle to offload things to DVD-R.
A way better indicator is (as another poster mentioned) is the Human Development Index. Per-capita GDP doesn't take into account things like typical standard of living, wealth inequity, etc.
If you want a simple, raw economic number, MEDIAN income rather than mean income is one of the better indicators of the wealth of a nation's people. Slightly better is median income scaled to purchasing power. Unfortunately I don't have tables for these. =(
...but any geek will run out of disk space at some point. My WORK machines have multi-terabyte arrays that are not close to running out of space -- but that's because it's work and I have a bit more freedom in the budget. They're multiuser systems and running out of disk space simply is not an option.
For a personal machine though, unless you are rich you can't really afford to throw hugeish amounts of disk space at the problem. Drives get full -- it's a fact of life. A defragging tool really helps in these situations.
Again - Linux isn't significantly behind at anything important for a generic desktop user. Feel free to give me specific examples if you think I'm wrong. The fact that you can't find a defragmenting tool or a virus scanner is *ok*.
Actually there's quite a few virus scanners for Linux -- in fact there's even a FOSS one, ClamAV. Granted, they're geared mostly towards finding WINDOWS viruses, but that's simply because there aren't really many Linux viruses out there.
The few Linux worms out there can usually be found with something like chkrootkit.
That said, the lack of a defragmenter is kind of worrying. There IS an ext2 defragmenter out there, and it's possible to use it on ext3 by nuking the journal (making the partition ext2), defragging, and then rejournal the partition (make it ext3 again). I think people place too much faith in the ability of Linux filesystems to "avoid fragmentation".
Using the old "copy to another partition and then copy back" method of defragging, I've seen some noticeable improvement in application launch times and such on heavily-fragmented drives. The drawback is you can't do this when all your drives are full. I can only do it because I'm a sysadmin and I can temporarily plug a work drive into my personal machine for this purpose. =P
However, on reflection, I have a question that only Chinese readers can answer: Is it possible to make "puns" on characters, e.g. to combine other characters with different meaning so that together they are pronounce the same as "democracy"?
In Japanese, which is an entirely different languages of course (and not tonal like Chinese), it's certainly possible to make puns using Chinese characters.
For instance, a common insult on many Japanese forums is to call the other person a "chuubou". "chuu" meaning middle, "bou" meaning boy. It basically means middle school boy, implying that the person is an immature kid. The insult became so grievous and prolific that a lot of boards now censor the word.
As a result, people started using another kanji pair that's ALSO pronounced "chuubou", which means "kitchen". Thus it is now common to see people insultingly call eachother "kitchen" in a Japanese flamewar.
I imagine there may be something similar in Chinese, however the pun would probably only work in a single dialect.
It's just I really DON'T want people knowing I spend 40% of my time on slashdot. I don't have a reason in particular, I just DON'T. I place a significant value on NOT having information about be spread willy nilly everwhere.
Regarding Javascript, I REALLY don't like the idea of my browser automatically running code that someone else has written without me having the chance to check it out first. I don't think javascript is evil as a language, I just don't like the idea of going to a website and blindly running code from there. I don't care that it's in a sandbox -- all it takes is one exploit for the code to break its way out of the sandbox and boom. (And hopefully I'm running Linux and the developer is too focused on Win32 for his payload to do anything once it's out of javascriptland, but you never know.)
Seriously, I'm never going to put instant, blind trust in anything online until I've checked it out first, and even then on general principles I won't enable cookies or jscript unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
I have it because it's my primary internet connection. I live one block from a hotspot and I get it from my house. $30/month for a T1 (that almost nobody else uses) is not that bad even though it's NAT'd.
The account is good at thousands of hotspots world wide (including, I assume, this train one), so really it's a pretty good deal.
I've been thinking of getting a Sidekick -- then the fee for a TMob Hotspot account would drop to $20. =P
(Just to stress that I'm not astroturfing here -- I don't think I'd pay for this service if it weren't my primary internet connection at home... There's lots of free hotspots available at all sorts of businesses and public places... but if I traveled a lot more and were well-payed, I think I'd do it.)
Aside from the obvious silliness, this animation mentions that the new microdrives will be able to store 30,000 songs!
I imagine some people out there have 30,000 songs, but I highly doubt legally.
The RIAA thinks $1 a song isn't enough, and want to charge $2 or more a song... but for a second let's assume that the $1/song price stays. That's still $30,000! Who's going to pay that much for their music?
Hitachi obviously is encouraging piracy here. =D Would be cool if they took on the RIAA head on. =3
EXCUSE ME, where did this attitude and why have we come to this?
I remember when I was a kid, I was always told that one of the GREAT things about my country that made us better than the evil communists was that I could travel around my country without having to show my papers, without having to prove who I was, etc.
I was told horror stories of the Soviet Union, about how to go between republics I'd have to show my papers at a checkpoint so they could track who I was and where I was going. I was told how evil this was and how I was lucky to be born in the U.S.A. where we had freedom and liberty and didn't have to show our identification in daily life.
Twenty years later and I have to show my ID whenever I travel. I guess since we don't have the Soviet Union anymore, so we don't have to be better than them.
Well, it was my understanding that it was the reason Valve hired him in the first place -- although he and Valve parted without comment some time afterwards and neither has told the full story publically (probably contractual reasons.)
I guess I should qualify these things with "As far as I know."
I could most certainly be wrong.
And it's nice to know the CD check is gone (as least on CSS). Now they need to remove the mandatory network requirements for installing the single-player game.
Using my bandwidth to download their client and play on their server is simply paying for my means of transport.
If I order something from a catalog or an online store (let's say Amazon), I'm expected to pay shipping and handling to receive the product. In the case of downloading something or playing it online, paying for my internet connection is equivalent of the shipping and handling.
A real-life equivalent would be Amazon demanding that I work in their shipping department and pay postage so they don't have to have to pay employees or postage for shipping products to other customers.
I'll give friends or even strangers copies of Knoppix without charging them for the CD-Rs or the time it takes me to burn them... I wouldn't handle distribution of Windows XP for Microsoft in the same way. If I'm doing work or expending resources for a profit-making corp -- they pay me, I don't pay them.
Steam? As in Valve's distribution mechanism? That Steam, at least, doesn't do anything like that. There is no P2P mechanism in steam, clients are pure clients. Updates are downloaded from a network of mirrors distributed geographically ("Total Available Bandwidth: 14,635.00Mbps"). Come to think of it, I wonder what protocol is used to transfer data from the content servers... it might be some Steam-proprietary protocol, but chances are it's simply HTTP or FTP.
Ahh perhaps I was mistaken then. I know Steam employed Cohen's technology (since he wrote Steam's network engine and all) to allow many peers to seed the network, I didn't realize the "seeding peers" in it were limited to Valve's.
Still, even if I was wrong about Steam, I stand by my original point that the concept in the parent post -- expecting users to pay you so they can distribute their content for you -- is a really bogus idea.
I have lots of other uses I could use my upstream bandwidth for.
(And Steam still sucks for many other reasons. The most inane part that I have to ask the network for permission to play a game that I went and paid for in a store, and then it adds insult to injury by demanding I insert the original CD as punishment for buying a physical copy rather than downloading it via Steam.)
This is basically what Steam does....and it's a crock, because it's basically paying the company to use YOUR resources.
Plenty of people are willing to donate the upstream bandwidth they pay for to support noncommercial uses (be it legally for open source software, or illegally for liberated/copyrightinfringement software).
It's a whole different kettle of fish when your upstream goes to pay for THEIR costs.
A fairer scheme would be that they'd give you the material for free in exchange for you hosting their torrent long enough, so that people who have more money than time (executives, doctors, bankers) can pay for convenience, and people who have more time than money (students, minimum wage workers) can get what they want for free in exchange for taking the time and bandwidth to host stuff.
Here at the Idaho State University College of Engineering, I run the CS facilities. We built our student labs out of old "freebie" computers that other departments wanted to get rid of. They run as xterms, and about 24 stations connect to a central dual Opteron 246 system (gigabit to the switch, 100Mbit to the terminals, fast RAIDed storage)
In practice, for anything but serious number crunching, the end-user performance of using the system as an xterm connected to a powerful central system is far snappier than running things locally. For anything but multimedia, the 100mbit X11 remote display gives a blazing fast GUI.
Our xterms run fine with 64-128M of RAM, and that's without trying particularly hard to strip down the versions of Linux we run on them. With 256M, we could run OpenMosix on them and leverage their spare CPU cycles as a cluster.
With any computer I build for anyone, or even work on, I immediately suggest they replace their elcrappo no-name PSU with a quality PSU from Enermax, Antec, or Sparkle.
The PSU is the one component in your system that can destroy everything else in your system. It is worth every penny to purchase a good one.
Actually plenty of smaller not-national-chain car rental places will rent with cash deposit. I rented a car in San Diego once using cash. Check the ads in the yellow pages, some places advertise that they take cash deposit.
Also, unique among the national chains, some Enterprise locations will accept cash deposit -- I've done that as well. (This is entirely up to the manager of that particular Enterprise location. You may need to take a utility bill with you.)
Slashdot Mirror
...and it's called the European Commission. It's no wonder so many people in EU nations hate the concept of the EU -- its executive branch is made up of officials that A) Aren't elected, B) Can pass legislature on their own as if they WERE the legislature -- and instead it's the legislature's job to vote DOWN European Commission directives! (se e the whole software patent case where the EU Parliament saved our butts repeatedly)
...not a bunch of oligarchs.
The whole EU model needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up. =/ Either have an elected presidency or a prime minister or SOMETHING as the executive branch...
Hyperion Entertainment does ports to MacOS and Linux for hire, specializing in games. If you're willing to pay, it's doable.
You implied that everything was okay because while the sites rah rahing the terrorists were down, Al Jazeera was still around. Either you were implying that they were part of the same group, with Al Jazeera simply being a "milder" form that counted as "free speech", or you did understand the nature of Al Jazeera and your statement was just nonsensical.
Imagine for a moment a mirror universe where the middle easterners had far more control over the internet and had the power to shut down western websites that were rahrahing westerners blowing things up in the middle east. That would be like saying "It's okay that they shut down Fox News, because free-speech sites like Pacifica Radio (the only extreme-liberal broadcaster I can think of in the U.S. on short notice) are still up!"
It makes zero sense because the two sites have nothing to do with eachother, aside from being run by people of the same ethnicity.
If you were suddenly confronted by a group of men brandishing guns, wouldn't your first thought be to get away? Especially if they were shouting at you in a foreign language?
These were not regular police officers in uniform, and they were understandably worried and probably as a result weren't as clear about who they were.
I wouldn't be surprised if in his panic he thought *THEY* were terrorists.
The irony is, apparently he wore the clothing to cover his equipment because he was afraid people would be suspicious of all the wires and such he was carrying (those being the tools of his electrician trade).
:: sigh ::
Why do so many westerners completely fail to understand the nature of Al Jazeera? Study for a bit! Al Jazeera is run by flaming liberal (at least by Arabic standards) journalists who would be the first against the wall if the jihadists took over!
They give the jihadists coverage in the same way the liberal ACLU defends conservative white supremacists -- they see themselves as giving a voice to dissent, even if the group they're giving a voice to hates their guts.
Believe me, nobody at Al Jazeera actually wants the ultraconservative jihadists in power. It would mean the end of Al Jazeera.
Yup, this is what I generally do.
/home an entire drive to itself. Sometimes I put /var or at the very least /var/spool on a partition on that drive as well, other times I'll put it on an older, smaller drive since /var doesn't usually have to be super fast (mostly very small accesses -- if you have an old 10,000 rpm SCSI drive it can be very useful for this purpose -- it benefits more from seek time than media transfer rate).
/home fills to the brim and gets all ugly and fragmented as I struggle to offload things to DVD-R.
In fact, I usually give
And invariably
A way better indicator is (as another poster mentioned) is the Human Development Index. Per-capita GDP doesn't take into account things like typical standard of living, wealth inequity, etc.
Another good indicator is the Quality of Life Index.
If you want a simple, raw economic number, MEDIAN income rather than mean income is one of the better indicators of the wealth of a nation's people. Slightly better is median income scaled to purchasing power. Unfortunately I don't have tables for these. =(
...but any geek will run out of disk space at some point. My WORK machines have multi-terabyte arrays that are not close to running out of space -- but that's because it's work and I have a bit more freedom in the budget. They're multiuser systems and running out of disk space simply is not an option.
For a personal machine though, unless you are rich you can't really afford to throw hugeish amounts of disk space at the problem. Drives get full -- it's a fact of life. A defragging tool really helps in these situations.
Wasn't torrentreactor.net taken over by scammers?
I thought the original torrentreactor was now at torrentreactor.to
Again - Linux isn't significantly behind at anything important for a generic desktop user. Feel free to give me specific examples if you think I'm wrong. The fact that you can't find a defragmenting tool or a virus scanner is *ok*.
Actually there's quite a few virus scanners for Linux -- in fact there's even a FOSS one, ClamAV. Granted, they're geared mostly towards finding WINDOWS viruses, but that's simply because there aren't really many Linux viruses out there.
The few Linux worms out there can usually be found with something like chkrootkit.
That said, the lack of a defragmenter is kind of worrying. There IS an ext2 defragmenter out there, and it's possible to use it on ext3 by nuking the journal (making the partition ext2), defragging, and then rejournal the partition (make it ext3 again). I think people place too much faith in the ability of Linux filesystems to "avoid fragmentation".
Using the old "copy to another partition and then copy back" method of defragging, I've seen some noticeable improvement in application launch times and such on heavily-fragmented drives. The drawback is you can't do this when all your drives are full. I can only do it because I'm a sysadmin and I can temporarily plug a work drive into my personal machine for this purpose. =P
However, on reflection, I have a question that only Chinese readers can answer: Is it possible to make "puns" on characters, e.g. to combine other characters with different meaning so that together they are pronounce the same as "democracy"?
In Japanese, which is an entirely different languages of course (and not tonal like Chinese), it's certainly possible to make puns using Chinese characters.
For instance, a common insult on many Japanese forums is to call the other person a "chuubou". "chuu" meaning middle, "bou" meaning boy. It basically means middle school boy, implying that the person is an immature kid. The insult became so grievous and prolific that a lot of boards now censor the word.
As a result, people started using another kanji pair that's ALSO pronounced "chuubou", which means "kitchen". Thus it is now common to see people insultingly call eachother "kitchen" in a Japanese flamewar.
I imagine there may be something similar in Chinese, however the pun would probably only work in a single dialect.
Am I the only one who read it initially as "PC Case Made Completely of Flan"?
That sounds a lot tastier!
I believe this was the article in question:
5 ?ek20050421ks.htm
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl
It's just I really DON'T want people knowing I spend 40% of my time on slashdot. I don't have a reason in particular, I just DON'T. I place a significant value on NOT having information about be spread willy nilly everwhere.
Regarding Javascript, I REALLY don't like the idea of my browser automatically running code that someone else has written without me having the chance to check it out first. I don't think javascript is evil as a language, I just don't like the idea of going to a website and blindly running code from there. I don't care that it's in a sandbox -- all it takes is one exploit for the code to break its way out of the sandbox and boom. (And hopefully I'm running Linux and the developer is too focused on Win32 for his payload to do anything once it's out of javascriptland, but you never know.)
Seriously, I'm never going to put instant, blind trust in anything online until I've checked it out first, and even then on general principles I won't enable cookies or jscript unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
(3 the session-only feature in Moz browsers) =D
I have it because it's my primary internet connection. I live one block from a hotspot and I get it from my house. $30/month for a T1 (that almost nobody else uses) is not that bad even though it's NAT'd.
The account is good at thousands of hotspots world wide (including, I assume, this train one), so really it's a pretty good deal.
I've been thinking of getting a Sidekick -- then the fee for a TMob Hotspot account would drop to $20. =P
(Just to stress that I'm not astroturfing here -- I don't think I'd pay for this service if it weren't my primary internet connection at home... There's lots of free hotspots available at all sorts of businesses and public places... but if I traveled a lot more and were well-payed, I think I'd do it.)
To be fair, yes, there is. =3 It would definitely be cool if more and more music on people's players was open-license music.
That said, somehow I don't think that's what they're talking about here. ^^;
( And wow I got modded Troll =D )
Aside from the obvious silliness, this animation mentions that the new microdrives will be able to store 30,000 songs!
I imagine some people out there have 30,000 songs, but I highly doubt legally.
The RIAA thinks $1 a song isn't enough, and want to charge $2 or more a song... but for a second let's assume that the $1/song price stays. That's still $30,000! Who's going to pay that much for their music?
Hitachi obviously is encouraging piracy here. =D Would be cool if they took on the RIAA head on. =3
EXCUSE ME, where did this attitude and why have we come to this?
I remember when I was a kid, I was always told that one of the GREAT things about my country that made us better than the evil communists was that I could travel around my country without having to show my papers, without having to prove who I was, etc.
I was told horror stories of the Soviet Union, about how to go between republics I'd have to show my papers at a checkpoint so they could track who I was and where I was going. I was told how evil this was and how I was lucky to be born in the U.S.A. where we had freedom and liberty and didn't have to show our identification in daily life.
Twenty years later and I have to show my ID whenever I travel. I guess since we don't have the Soviet Union anymore, so we don't have to be better than them.
We live in sad times.
Well, it was my understanding that it was the reason Valve hired him in the first place -- although he and Valve parted without comment some time afterwards and neither has told the full story publically (probably contractual reasons.)
I guess I should qualify these things with "As far as I know."
I could most certainly be wrong.
And it's nice to know the CD check is gone (as least on CSS). Now they need to remove the mandatory network requirements for installing the single-player game.
That's different, and you know it. Strawman.
Using my bandwidth to download their client and play on their server is simply paying for my means of transport.
If I order something from a catalog or an online store (let's say Amazon), I'm expected to pay shipping and handling to receive the product. In the case of downloading something or playing it online, paying for my internet connection is equivalent of the shipping and handling.
A real-life equivalent would be Amazon demanding that I work in their shipping department and pay postage so they don't have to have to pay employees or postage for shipping products to other customers.
I'll give friends or even strangers copies of Knoppix without charging them for the CD-Rs or the time it takes me to burn them... I wouldn't handle distribution of Windows XP for Microsoft in the same way. If I'm doing work or expending resources for a profit-making corp -- they pay me, I don't pay them.
Still, even if I was wrong about Steam, I stand by my original point that the concept in the parent post -- expecting users to pay you so they can distribute their content for you -- is a really bogus idea.
I have lots of other uses I could use my upstream bandwidth for.
(And Steam still sucks for many other reasons. The most inane part that I have to ask the network for permission to play a game that I went and paid for in a store, and then it adds insult to injury by demanding I insert the original CD as punishment for buying a physical copy rather than downloading it via Steam.)
This is basically what Steam does. ...and it's a crock, because it's basically paying the company to use YOUR resources.
Plenty of people are willing to donate the upstream bandwidth they pay for to support noncommercial uses (be it legally for open source software, or illegally for liberated/copyrightinfringement software).
It's a whole different kettle of fish when your upstream goes to pay for THEIR costs.
A fairer scheme would be that they'd give you the material for free in exchange for you hosting their torrent long enough, so that people who have more money than time (executives, doctors, bankers) can pay for convenience, and people who have more time than money (students, minimum wage workers) can get what they want for free in exchange for taking the time and bandwidth to host stuff.
Here at the Idaho State University College of Engineering, I run the CS facilities. We built our student labs out of old "freebie" computers that other departments wanted to get rid of. They run as xterms, and about 24 stations connect to a central dual Opteron 246 system (gigabit to the switch, 100Mbit to the terminals, fast RAIDed storage)
In practice, for anything but serious number crunching, the end-user performance of using the system as an xterm connected to a powerful central system is far snappier than running things locally. For anything but multimedia, the 100mbit X11 remote display gives a blazing fast GUI.
Our xterms run fine with 64-128M of RAM, and that's without trying particularly hard to strip down the versions of Linux we run on them. With 256M, we could run OpenMosix on them and leverage their spare CPU cycles as a cluster.
Anyway just some ideas you could consider.
With any computer I build for anyone, or even work on, I immediately suggest they replace their elcrappo no-name PSU with a quality PSU from Enermax, Antec, or Sparkle.
The PSU is the one component in your system that can destroy everything else in your system. It is worth every penny to purchase a good one.
Actually plenty of smaller not-national-chain car rental places will rent with cash deposit. I rented a car in San Diego once using cash. Check the ads in the yellow pages, some places advertise that they take cash deposit.
Also, unique among the national chains, some Enterprise locations will accept cash deposit -- I've done that as well. (This is entirely up to the manager of that particular Enterprise location. You may need to take a utility bill with you.)