I didn't know he wanted to become a US citizen. Not everybody wants to, you know. That would mean he'd have to give up his Finnish citizenship. I thought he only wanted a green card (which he definately deserves!).
Well, a number of people forget the basic concepts and use only 3 significant digits for conversion (e.g., 2.54cm = 1inch).
How many digits do you want? If you want ten digits, then 1inch = 2.540000000cm. It's exact (fortunately!). The only place where you might get problems is in the fractions, and you don't really measure stuff in fractions in industry. You can have 12.345 miles, then for an accurate conversion (as accurate as it is now) you can take a few more digits as the original number has.
Of course, Fahrenheit to Celcius is another matter, with its 5/9 fraction. But there, again, you most certainly are dealing with decimal numbers anyway, not exact Fahrenheits.
Shortly put, conversion should be no problem as long as it's done even a bit the smart way.
Has anybody else wondered why only Linux versions of software are made open source? For example, "At the present time, Tripwire has no plans to make its commercial UNIX versions or NT available as open source." (from the FAQ) and AFAIK Troll Tech has made only the Linux version of qt open.
Is the reason the background of the OS? Linux users are used to having the source and a product which doesn't offer source can't expect a very wide acceptance in the Linux world (see for example some of the originally-closed drivers). In Windows, everybody is used to proprietary software, so they couldn't care less.
Another peculiar thing is, why do they keep different versions for different architechtures? I'd think it would be easier to manage only one code base with #ifdef's or separate low-level files. It might be possible that they only omit the Windows-specific files, but in this case any GPL additions to the Linux version (made by users) couldn't be compiled into the Windows version.
This, on the other hand, would mean that the Linux version would inevitably become better than the corresponding Windows version. The only legal way they could get the same features into the Windows version would be to code them themselves from scratch, and who's to say they didn't use any GPL-only code? Or do they demand everybody who contributes anything to dual-licence it so they can use it in the closed Windows version also?
What is the effect of this law to foreigners? CSS was to my knowledge cracked in Norway, but still the creator is being prosecuted under the DMCA (AFAIK).
Can somebody with some understanding of the situation please explain how some US law can affect anybody outside the States/any non-US citizen? Am I still allowed to crack US-made encryption systems here in Finland?
In Finland, the government has a monopoly in gambling. All funds raised that way go to different kinds of charity. The problem is Internet gambling, which they cannot stop, which is deteriorating the monopoly. Now, they fear that other gambling companies will get the right to merchandise their gambling sites, which could lead to a radical diminishing of funding.
In my opinion, the system is good. Some people must gamble, but when they do, is better that the money goes to a good cause.
Lotteries are a tax on people that suck at math
-- Somebody's sig on slashdot.
BTW. Why is it that every time I post a message on slashdot it crashes just before I submit..?
Isn't there a period of time when people can complain about patent applications? Isn't that info available or is nobody just reading it? Why aren't these kind of things aroused before they are granted a patent status?
This was asked a while ago, but I guess it's useful to ask it again (sorry, I'm too lazy to dig up the URL):
Q: Why sign something? In real life, when you sign something it means you said it and mean it. If you don't sign it, it's just chatter. So why sign stuff on the Internet?
The answer previously was that digital signatures aren't valid "signatures" and the value of them only is in that the recipiant can know for certain who sent it.
How does this bill change this situation? Can a signature you meant to be only ensurance that you have sent it be used law-bindingly? Where's the difference?
As some posters have mentioned, there are many problems in open-source entertainment. First, people don't neccessarily want to know what's going on in the background. I don't see this as a problem, as they don't have to see it. A second point was that cheating would be possible. This, of course, doesn't matter on a personal computer (that's why commercial games have cheat codes!), but in a network game that would create a problem. The best I can think of would be checking whether some move is possible and not sending stuff the other doesn't need to know. Besides that, I guess it's just up to ethics.
But the largest problem of open-source action games as I see it is boredom. People play a game for a while and then buy (or download) a new one. The only thing that might change that would be extensibility - see for example Quake. It was made to be extensible, and it is still played (HOW many years old is it?).
So as goes for many other open-source projects, make it THE simulator that is configurable for almost any liking. Of course, not everything should be added to the same engine/codebase (first-person shooter + flight simulator doesn't make much sense), but everything related. Give the option for everything from an easy way to shoot enemy planes to an ultimately-realistic flight to a space flight (this extensibility could also reduce the amount of lamers that hack the code for benefit in a multi-player game).
Because people do it for fun and in their free time, each open-source project should live as long as possible. The only way to make a game live long is to make it extensible. So get to it.
of the noocytes in <a href="http://www.uta.edu/english/bek/cy-fi/blood.h tml"></i>Blood Music<i> by Greg Bear</a>. Both the
The I-tags are the wrong way around! At least on my Netscape Communicator 4.7 it shows the whole rest of the page in italics, underlined and in the same color as links (ie. looks like one looong link)! (OK, it seems like a but in netscape, but still could it be corrected....)
The effect of which is like having your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
--Douglas Adams, HHGTTG
I recently switched from Slackware to Debian and I feel the install was horrible. I can't recall all of them, but for instance, it gave me a nice list of what package groups I want to install. I just had bought a 45GB harddisk, so I was on my way to waste space. I selected most of the stuff, but it did not install half of the most used stuff (development eg. automake/autoconf/etc.). Next it started asking silly configuration questions eg. for Zopy. At the time, I had absolutely no idea of what Zopy was (it's still a bit vague to me) and it didn't tell me, it didn't ask me whether I wanted it, it just asked configuration parameters for Zopy.
When I started wasting my HD space I simply checked anything that seemed intresting in gnome-apt (why isn't there a good frontend for that apt?). I ended up with all the possible game servers running... (OK, it might be expected that if someone installs a server he wants to run it too, but on my Slackware system I had both xdm and gdm installed with only xdm running. Debian starts screaming and kicking about it every time I start apt).
But the problem I faced was how to disable the daemons. A few of the most hard were anachrond, wwwofle (or whatever...) and zopy. I removed them from/etc/rc.?/S??XXXX, so they don't start when booting (but it started complaining at shutdown - why? If the daemon is not running "/etc/init.d/XXX stop" should IMHO say nothing), but somehow they always managed to start in a day or two. I finally gave in and uninstalled them.
Perhaps one improvement might be to first tell it what I want.
[X] I want a development environment.
[ ] I want a server configuration.
[X] I want a nice graphical system.
[X] I want to waste disk space.
It seems like a nice distro on the whole, but the installation and management should definately be made more user-friendly. For example it seems to assume that everybody has a fast Internet connection... Can I tell apt "get the newest even if it requires downloading them", "download only if a version is not available locally" or "never download anything"?
-- Ugh.. Just my rant on an unhappy install.. Blah blah blah..
Finland-based Nokia said that it was already in contact with Web2Wap, but that Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, had itself never experienced such problems in the past.
That is not true.
Sending a message with 160 chars of '.' in it to older 5110 models caused them to lock up too. I've heard that this was an easter-egg deliberately made by some coder (though I'm not sure is this true or just another urban legend). The newer models don't have the bug (eg. mine doesn't - version 05.07 20-11-98 (you can see the version by typing *#0000#)).
Furthermore, this article (only Finnish, sorry) says that in some cases the SMS also destroyed the SIM-card (no specifics mentioned).
The article also mentions that Web2Wap has contacted Nokia and Nokia experts will meet with them Wednesday, but Nokia denies getting any contact requests. Typical.
IMHO, before somebody solves the 'strong AI problem', the computer could quite simply ask the user:
"Do you want to enter a financial check, make an illegal chess move or make a constraint in the program you are writing?"
The system should always calculate an amount of ambiguity for each statement, and if the action is clear enough, execute it. If not, then ask for clarification.
As for the story of "delete *$" here, some commands should be marked more "dangerous" than others. In these cases confirmation should be asked much more often than in non-dangerous activities.
Sure lots of avid Windows Netscape fans will rejoice with the newe browser, and sure a lot of Mac fans will use it, and you can be certain that a lot of the Unix crowd will be afire. But what's the real reason Mozilla is going to save the web from being dominated by Microsoft?
But the real story here is AOL -... Suddenly there's another 22 million users you have to take into account.
Another 22 million users will make a bit deal? Isn't Linux users alone estimated at 15-25 million? Don't they count for some reason?
Anyway, comparing that to the amount of web-users, it's not much. Also, I'd guess most of AOL users are also Windows-users, so are they all forced into using Mozilla? (I haven't ever used AOL, so I don't know about their software)
Pegboard? Buying a new computer? Pentium75, 875MB HDD?
I wanted an X-terminal for a second machine. I wanted it cheap. I wanted it really cheap. I also wanted it really quiet. I then rummaged around my cupboard for pieces. All neccessary was there.
The only problem was space: I didn't have that in my room. The only free case I had was a full-sized tower. I didn't want that crowding my room, so I hung it on the size of my desk. No fine pegboard or such, just a few screws and voila!
It's a 486 SX 25MHz with no hard drive (that would have been noisy) and with even the power supply's fan tweaked slower. And I can run the latest version of Netscape on it any day.
Actually the gamma-ray burst most often only outshine the whole galaxy, but almost never the universe. Only one time has such a powerful burst been noticed that it momentarily outshone the whole universe. That threw quite a few theories back to the drawing board!
Why bother so much with a satellite link to international waters. Just launch your own satellite and put the stuff there. I guess space is just as international as oceans...
Of course, it might still be illegal for you to place the material on the satellite (for example sending cryptography material from the US)...
How about mp3/radio, for example. MP3 alone is very small, but a CD requires a helluva lot space. I'd rather have a small mp3 and small radio integrated.
(Or perhapse minidisc/radio.)
Saw them too - for 2 hours.
on
G3 Solar Storm
·
· Score: 1
First a slight correction - Finland is now at GMT+3 due to DST (or does UTC have DST?).
My story of yesterday night:
Got a phone call from my brother at 22:20 and started looking west, where there was the brightest green lights I have ever seen. We live in the middle of the city Vantaa, but even so they were very bright. At the end we even saw a stripe of red (never seen red before) - though this whole show was just the beginning...
After about half an hour it started to dim a bit and I left but noticed some lights also in the east - they were going directly overhead from west to east. At that point I went outside (though I was a bit in the flu...).
Very soon it started to grow spanning the whole visual area and flashing in green and red - it was awesome! That show went on about half an hour and then started to dim a bit.
I was just leaving when I noticed green light brigten up a bit in the west and stayed a little longer. At just a little after midnight it flared up again for about a quarter of an hour even more brightly than before.
I watched them a total of 2 hours, though I have heard that they would have flared up again even more brightly at about 3-4 in the morning, but I was fast asleep...
They were awesome, I never thought they could be so vivid...
One image has stuck into my mind of it all. At 11.20 the big dipper shining brightly through a veil of bright red...
Anyway, that was my story. Anybody else want to share some with us?
There has been a lot of talk about the motivation of Open Source (or whatever...) coders recently. What is your personal source of motivation towards it? What might be done to make the overall motivation better?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know he wanted to become a US citizen. Not everybody wants to, you know. That would mean he'd have to give up his Finnish citizenship. I thought he only wanted a green card (which he definately deserves!).
Well, a number of people forget the basic concepts and use only 3 significant digits for conversion (e.g., 2.54cm = 1inch).
How many digits do you want? If you want ten digits, then 1inch = 2.540000000cm. It's exact (fortunately!). The only place where you might get problems is in the fractions, and you don't really measure stuff in fractions in industry. You can have 12.345 miles, then for an accurate conversion (as accurate as it is now) you can take a few more digits as the original number has.
Of course, Fahrenheit to Celcius is another matter, with its 5/9 fraction. But there, again, you most certainly are dealing with decimal numbers anyway, not exact Fahrenheits.
Shortly put, conversion should be no problem as long as it's done even a bit the smart way.
How do I find it amusing to have these two stories one after another?
At Last, Mir to be Ditched
Iridium Saved?
How many times have both been ditched and then miraculously saved, has anybody been counting??
Has anybody else wondered why only Linux versions of software are made open source? For example, "At the present time, Tripwire has no plans to make its commercial UNIX versions or NT available as open source." (from the FAQ) and AFAIK Troll Tech has made only the Linux version of qt open.
Is the reason the background of the OS? Linux users are used to having the source and a product which doesn't offer source can't expect a very wide acceptance in the Linux world (see for example some of the originally-closed drivers). In Windows, everybody is used to proprietary software, so they couldn't care less.
Another peculiar thing is, why do they keep different versions for different architechtures? I'd think it would be easier to manage only one code base with #ifdef's or separate low-level files. It might be possible that they only omit the Windows-specific files, but in this case any GPL additions to the Linux version (made by users) couldn't be compiled into the Windows version.
This, on the other hand, would mean that the Linux version would inevitably become better than the corresponding Windows version. The only legal way they could get the same features into the Windows version would be to code them themselves from scratch, and who's to say they didn't use any GPL-only code? Or do they demand everybody who contributes anything to dual-licence it so they can use it in the closed Windows version also?
Any ideas, anyone?
What is the effect of this law to foreigners? CSS was to my knowledge cracked in Norway, but still the creator is being prosecuted under the DMCA (AFAIK).
Can somebody with some understanding of the situation please explain how some US law can affect anybody outside the States/any non-US citizen? Am I still allowed to crack US-made encryption systems here in Finland?
Governmental gambling is not neccessarily bad.
In Finland, the government has a monopoly in gambling. All funds raised that way go to different kinds of charity. The problem is Internet gambling, which they cannot stop, which is deteriorating the monopoly. Now, they fear that other gambling companies will get the right to merchandise their gambling sites, which could lead to a radical diminishing of funding.
In my opinion, the system is good. Some people must gamble, but when they do, is better that the money goes to a good cause.
Lotteries are a tax on people that suck at math
-- Somebody's sig on slashdot.
BTW. Why is it that every time I post a message on slashdot it crashes just before I submit..?
I hope they won't run out of file descriptors...
Isn't there a period of time when people can complain about patent applications? Isn't that info available or is nobody just reading it? Why aren't these kind of things aroused before they are granted a patent status?
This was asked a while ago, but I guess it's useful to ask it again (sorry, I'm too lazy to dig up the URL):
Q: Why sign something? In real life, when you sign something it means you said it and mean it. If you don't sign it, it's just chatter. So why sign stuff on the Internet?
The answer previously was that digital signatures aren't valid "signatures" and the value of them only is in that the recipiant can know for certain who sent it.
How does this bill change this situation? Can a signature you meant to be only ensurance that you have sent it be used law-bindingly? Where's the difference?
As some posters have mentioned, there are many problems in open-source entertainment. First, people don't neccessarily want to know what's going on in the background. I don't see this as a problem, as they don't have to see it. A second point was that cheating would be possible. This, of course, doesn't matter on a personal computer (that's why commercial games have cheat codes!), but in a network game that would create a problem. The best I can think of would be checking whether some move is possible and not sending stuff the other doesn't need to know. Besides that, I guess it's just up to ethics.
But the largest problem of open-source action games as I see it is boredom. People play a game for a while and then buy (or download) a new one. The only thing that might change that would be extensibility - see for example Quake. It was made to be extensible, and it is still played (HOW many years old is it?).
So as goes for many other open-source projects, make it THE simulator that is configurable for almost any liking. Of course, not everything should be added to the same engine/codebase (first-person shooter + flight simulator doesn't make much sense), but everything related. Give the option for everything from an easy way to shoot enemy planes to an ultimately-realistic flight to a space flight (this extensibility could also reduce the amount of lamers that hack the code for benefit in a multi-player game).
Because people do it for fun and in their free time, each open-source project should live as long as possible. The only way to make a game live long is to make it extensible. So get to it.
The I-tags are the wrong way around! At least on my Netscape Communicator 4.7 it shows the whole rest of the page in italics, underlined and in the same color as links (ie. looks like one looong link)! (OK, it seems like a but in netscape, but still could it be corrected....)
The effect of which is like having your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
--Douglas Adams, HHGTTG
When I started wasting my HD space I simply checked anything that seemed intresting in gnome-apt (why isn't there a good frontend for that apt?). I ended up with all the possible game servers running... (OK, it might be expected that if someone installs a server he wants to run it too, but on my Slackware system I had both xdm and gdm installed with only xdm running. Debian starts screaming and kicking about it every time I start apt).
But the problem I faced was how to disable the daemons. A few of the most hard were anachrond, wwwofle (or whatever...) and zopy. I removed them from
Perhaps one improvement might be to first tell it what I want.
It seems like a nice distro on the whole, but the installation and management should definately be made more user-friendly. For example it seems to assume that everybody has a fast Internet connection... Can I tell apt "get the newest even if it requires downloading them", "download only if a version is not available locally" or "never download anything"?
-- Ugh.. Just my rant on an unhappy install.. Blah blah blah..
Finland-based Nokia said that it was already in contact with Web2Wap, but that Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, had itself never experienced such problems in the past.
That is not true.
Sending a message with 160 chars of '.' in it to older 5110 models caused them to lock up too. I've heard that this was an easter-egg deliberately made by some coder (though I'm not sure is this true or just another urban legend). The newer models don't have the bug (eg. mine doesn't - version 05.07 20-11-98 (you can see the version by typing *#0000#)).
Furthermore, this article (only Finnish, sorry) says that in some cases the SMS also destroyed the SIM-card (no specifics mentioned).
The article also mentions that Web2Wap has contacted Nokia and Nokia experts will meet with them Wednesday, but Nokia denies getting any contact requests. Typical.
Use any spare cycles to read Slashdot
Read Slashdot? Why not something useful like Seti@home or RC5?
"Enter a check", huh?
IMHO, before somebody solves the 'strong AI problem', the computer could quite simply ask the user:
"Do you want to enter a financial check, make an illegal chess move or make a constraint in the program you are writing?"
The system should always calculate an amount of ambiguity for each statement, and if the action is clear enough, execute it. If not, then ask for clarification.
As for the story of "delete *$" here, some commands should be marked more "dangerous" than others. In these cases confirmation should be asked much more often than in non-dangerous activities.
Sure lots of avid Windows Netscape fans will rejoice with the newe browser, and sure a lot of Mac fans will use it, and you can be certain that a lot of the Unix crowd will be afire. But what's the real reason Mozilla is going to save the web from being dominated by Microsoft?
... Suddenly there's another 22 million users you have to take into account.
But the real story here is AOL -
Another 22 million users will make a bit deal? Isn't Linux users alone estimated at 15-25 million? Don't they count for some reason?
Anyway, comparing that to the amount of web-users, it's not much. Also, I'd guess most of AOL users are also Windows-users, so are they all forced into using Mozilla? (I haven't ever used AOL, so I don't know about their software)
Pegboard? Buying a new computer? Pentium75, 875MB HDD?
I wanted an X-terminal for a second machine. I wanted it cheap. I wanted it really cheap. I also wanted it really quiet. I then rummaged around my cupboard for pieces. All neccessary was there.
The only problem was space: I didn't have that in my room. The only free case I had was a full-sized tower. I didn't want that crowding my room, so I hung it on the size of my desk. No fine pegboard or such, just a few screws and voila!
It's a 486 SX 25MHz with no hard drive (that would have been noisy) and with even the power supply's fan tweaked slower. And I can run the latest version of Netscape on it any day.
What I'm wondering about is that if the pistons fire every time you land, how are you supposed to stop?!?
Actually the gamma-ray burst most often only outshine the whole galaxy, but almost never the universe. Only one time has such a powerful burst been noticed that it momentarily outshone the whole universe. That threw quite a few theories back to the drawing board!
Article about it for example here.
Why bother so much with a satellite link to international waters. Just launch your own satellite and put the stuff there. I guess space is just as international as oceans...
Of course, it might still be illegal for you to place the material on the satellite (for example sending cryptography material from the US)...
How about mp3/radio, for example. MP3 alone is very small, but a CD requires a helluva lot space. I'd rather have a small mp3 and small radio integrated.
(Or perhapse minidisc/radio.)
First a slight correction - Finland is now at GMT+3 due to DST (or does UTC have DST?).
My story of yesterday night:
Got a phone call from my brother at 22:20 and started looking west, where there was the brightest green lights I have ever seen. We live in the middle of the city Vantaa, but even so they were very bright. At the end we even saw a stripe of red (never seen red before) - though this whole show was just the beginning...
After about half an hour it started to dim a bit and I left but noticed some lights also in the east - they were going directly overhead from west to east. At that point I went outside (though I was a bit in the flu...).
Very soon it started to grow spanning the whole visual area and flashing in green and red - it was awesome! That show went on about half an hour and then started to dim a bit.
I was just leaving when I noticed green light brigten up a bit in the west and stayed a little longer. At just a little after midnight it flared up again for about a quarter of an hour even more brightly than before.
I watched them a total of 2 hours, though I have heard that they would have flared up again even more brightly at about 3-4 in the morning, but I was fast asleep...
They were awesome, I never thought they could be so vivid...
One image has stuck into my mind of it all. At 11.20 the big dipper shining brightly through a veil of bright red...
Anyway, that was my story. Anybody else want to share some with us?
There has been a lot of talk about the motivation of Open Source (or whatever...) coders recently. What is your personal source of motivation towards it? What might be done to make the overall motivation better?
chmod 400 ~/.netscape/cookies
/.), I have to change it to writable (temporarily).
Of course, when I want to get a cookie (e.g. from
For 400,000,000 digits, visit http://www.hepl.phys.nagoya- u.ac.jp/~mitsuru/pi-e.html!