Uh-oh, the AC mice have been rendered immune to irony by the cosmic rays!
And furthermore, I have seen dozens of stories pop up on Fark and then hours or even days later show up on Slashdot. And sorry, OSDN Personals are not as much fun as B**BIES!!
The United States is going to protect its currency very heavily. Don't provoke them by trying to circumvent this.
That reminds me, I was just down in Serbia last week, and a friend and I needed to change some money at the train station.
He had Euros, I had US Dollars.
He checked the price, handed over the Euros, and got his Dinars and a receipt.
I checked the price, handed over my Dollars, and... had to give the guy my passport, the number of which he wrote in a register, and then I had to sign next to the entry in order to get my Dinars.
So, as much as I love our undervalued greenbacks, I must say it would be nice if they were compatible with the standard counterfeit-detecting machines!
I knew a guy, a friend of a friend, in Romania, who 3 or 4 years ago got himself in Deep Doo-Doo.
He was drunk and thought it would be funny to make some funny money on his PC. He scanned in a bill worth about US$10, photoshopped a bit, and printed it out. Snip snip, done. I was probably a Really Lousy counterfeit, but it was a small enough bill I doubt anybody would examine it at first glance.
He then dropped into the closest mini-market and bought a pack of cigarettes with it. He got his cigs, his change, and most likely a stupid drunken grin on his face, and went to the bar.
A bit later the police showed up (I was in the bar) but fortunately his friends had told him we was probably in big trouble, and he had gone someplace to hide.
In the end it cost him a lot of non-fake money to keep his butt out of jail.
Bet he wishes he had had some of this DRM on his Photoshop...
I've been facing a similar dilemma, though I have some experience with desktop Linux (and a lot with servers).
Unfortunately, I'm not ready to live without Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, SoundForge and Flash MX. And I suppose I would probably absolutely have to run Excel etc every once in a while.
So I've been thinking about just running two computers all the time and having a KVM switch swap my input devices between them.
That way I could use Linux as my main software development and netstuff platform, and when I felt a need I could just flip the switch and be in my media authoring environment.
This might seem like overkill, but I have a hunch it's going to work out well. Until I get the cash together to build a Big Fat Compy and run VMware...
Well posting this late in the game nobody will read this except maybe you, but anyway...
Just felt like pointing out that another problem with the clickthrough concept is that people wishing to support a website, but with NO interest in your product, can just click on the ad, cost you money, and go back to the site they like.
I do this a lot, at least with GIF-based ads that I can open in a new browser tab.
If you're interested in stereoscopes, you'll probably like this: motion stereoscope art.
It's pretty cool stuff. I vaguely remember Naimark shooting a bunch of stereoscopic 16mm of a Survival Research Labs show in San Francisco, but I never saw the resulting footage.
Last week's Economist had an article on the Shanghai airport train.
The guy running the show basically said that as Shanghai becomes more prosperous and more people buy cars, traffic will become MUCH worse, and within a few years road-based transportation to the airport will be insanely inconvenient.
At that point he expects the train to be full all the time, and to make a profit.
The whole reason we have such great things as Perl is because some very smart people had an itch or two to scratch, and let us all have the results of their great work for free. That's called generosity.
If some of these very same people are now excited about other approaches to the problem, who are you to whine about them "breaking" things? Especially when the things you like and consider "good enough" are still available, for FREE, for you to use for the rest of your life?
When these very smart people go back to the drawing board and make something new, it usually results in something called progress.
"Ok, so Perl 5 will still be supported, but was it really so necessary to do the total rewrite and break the old code?"
Sorry, but until you are paying all these people for their time, it's really not yours to ask whether their projects are "necessary." If you don't feel like writing a new mysearchbot for Perl6, that's your business.
As for the Microsoft example, don't you think it's a little naive to consider the business model of a huge software company and the motivations of open-source developers in the same breath?
"When you rewrite you are abandoning history and condemning yourself to relive it."
Odd that the Reuters article doesn't even mention the controversy currently surrounding SCO's actions.
I wonder whether mainstream journalists are just asleep at the wheel on this one, or whether maybe this is just a case of press release plus one paragraph of "context" (that Google is maybe gonna IPO).
In the article it rather sounds like they just assumed Python performance would be an indicator of performance for interpreted languages generally, but is there anything to back this up?
Of course, India isn't the only place you could go - Hungary, where I live, is also a great outsourcing destination, even if it's a bit colder.
Or you could go to a smaller place in the US, away from the coasts, and cut your labor cost a lot as well. That might be nicer for you if you wanted to stay in the US and take advantage of its IT infrastructure, honest postal employees, and such.
But when I look around and see that here in Budapest I can hire a talented, experienced, multilingual IT professional for about the same as I would pay for an entry-level data-entry clerk back in San Francisco...
A) In our interplanetary explorations, at least until the shit hits the fan, we desire to be like doctors, and First do no harm.
B) We would like to know about any Mars Bacteria and get some nice samples so we can eliminate it before the shit hits the fan and we start colonizing, because you never know what it might do to us otherwise.
C) Given the realistic timeframe for manned Mars trips, even with China-US competition, we are worried about the higher life forms that might evolve from said bacteria before we actually send anyone up. There is reason for concern.
Why exactly is the clock an expected point of failure?
It seems to me that a super-sturdy clock is the smallest of challenges in a mission like this. I'm glad they considered the possibility of its failure, but can you or someone please clue me in as to why the clock of all things is so fragile?
Unless it auto-timezones to Martian time and finds itself in the year 2038...
I remember when the thing came out and there was the point that they "cheated" once or twice. I believe the "cheating" was less about physics than about photography - maybe the speakers?
In any case I hope Peter and David were paid well for this, 'cause if not then it's a rip-off of the highest order.
Not that they'd find that a bad thing necessarily... we artists are usually tickled pink to be plagiarized by Big Capital, and it certainly doesn't hurt our prices.
Since I live in both the "traditional" (painting) art world and the "new media" (computer/network/etc) world, I always find it amusing how people in the latter tend to be more ignorant of the former than the other way around. Even though there is always a lot of osmotic exchange of ideas between the two.
As general advice to non-geeky cafe owners, your is perfect. (Assuming you've locked down abusable ports.)
The only problem I see is that people might well end up with default passwords on their routers, all ports open, etc.
The main objective of the cafe owner may well be getting people to buy more coffee, but a lot of smaller neighborhood cafes are run by people who are very passionate about the environment they create- less to get more customers than to get the kind of people they like to have in their establishment.
And anyone looking to Slashdot for advice in helping them out is probably going to get more excited by a geekier, if higher-overhead, version.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh-oh, the AC mice have been rendered immune to irony by the cosmic rays!
And furthermore, I have seen dozens of stories pop up on Fark and then hours or even days later show up on Slashdot. And sorry, OSDN Personals are not as much fun as B**BIES!!
The United States is going to protect its currency very heavily. Don't provoke them by trying to circumvent this.
That reminds me, I was just down in Serbia last week, and a friend and I needed to change some money at the train station.
He had Euros, I had US Dollars.
He checked the price, handed over the Euros, and got his Dinars and a receipt.
I checked the price, handed over my Dollars, and... had to give the guy my passport, the number of which he wrote in a register, and then I had to sign next to the entry in order to get my Dinars.
So, as much as I love our undervalued greenbacks, I must say it would be nice if they were compatible with the standard counterfeit-detecting machines!
I knew a guy, a friend of a friend, in Romania, who 3 or 4 years ago got himself in Deep Doo-Doo.
He was drunk and thought it would be funny to make some funny money on his PC. He scanned in a bill worth about US$10, photoshopped a bit, and printed it out. Snip snip, done. I was probably a Really Lousy counterfeit, but it was a small enough bill I doubt anybody would examine it at first glance.
He then dropped into the closest mini-market and bought a pack of cigarettes with it. He got his cigs, his change, and most likely a stupid drunken grin on his face, and went to the bar.
A bit later the police showed up (I was in the bar) but fortunately his friends had told him we was probably in big trouble, and he had gone someplace to hide.
In the end it cost him a lot of non-fake money to keep his butt out of jail.
Bet he wishes he had had some of this DRM on his Photoshop...
I've been facing a similar dilemma, though I have some experience with desktop Linux (and a lot with servers).
Unfortunately, I'm not ready to live without Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects, SoundForge and Flash MX. And I suppose I would probably absolutely have to run Excel etc every once in a while.
So I've been thinking about just running two computers all the time and having a KVM switch swap my input devices between them.
That way I could use Linux as my main software development and netstuff platform, and when I felt a need I could just flip the switch and be in my media authoring environment.
This might seem like overkill, but I have a hunch it's going to work out well. Until I get the cash together to build a Big Fat Compy and run VMware...
Well posting this late in the game nobody will read this except maybe you, but anyway...
Just felt like pointing out that another problem with the clickthrough concept is that people wishing to support a website, but with NO interest in your product, can just click on the ad, cost you money, and go back to the site they like.
I do this a lot, at least with GIF-based ads that I can open in a new browser tab.
omfG, is that really the name of their law firm??
Well, I guess I can see how they got Biggar: by racking up the billable hours presenting 25-page cases against 17-year-old students.
I guess they're pretty Smart if they can get Microsoft to pay them for it.
Maybe SCO should talk to these guys, it looks lately like their law firm, Small & Dummar, isn't getting the job done...
If you're interested in stereoscopes, you'll probably like this:
motion stereoscope art.
It's pretty cool stuff. I vaguely remember Naimark shooting a bunch of stereoscopic 16mm of a Survival Research Labs show in San Francisco, but I never saw the resulting footage.
Who will create the PC equivalent of MacOS X?
Apple will. In fact they most likely already have.
But they won't sell it to you any time soon. Possibly never.
They just need it as a hedge against any Really Bad Things happening to their PowerPC supply chain.
Last week's Economist had an article on the Shanghai airport train.
The guy running the show basically said that as Shanghai becomes more prosperous and more people buy cars, traffic will become MUCH worse, and within a few years road-based transportation to the airport will be insanely inconvenient.
At that point he expects the train to be full all the time, and to make a profit.
Just make them watch Existenz a couple times a week.
That oughta fix it.
Here I post from Firebird/Win2K, and for what it's worth:
1. Firebird crashes about twice a week, and I have to kill the process before I can relaunch.
2. Sometimes my Bookmarks Toolbar icons mysteriously disappear, only to be regenerated when I revisit the sites.
3. Handling of unknown character sets is a Bad Joke.
4. Plug-in loading is pretty spotty.
5. There is no obvious indicator of Javascript errors on sites; I have to open the JS console when I suspect an error.
6. It's kinda slow to start on my slower computer (TransMeta 800Mhz), though it's snappy on my faster one (Duron 1.2Ghz).
7. It's still the best browser I've ever used, and I would tear out my hair if I had to live without it.
Go Firebird!!
Wow, that is one awful article.
The whole reason we have such great things as Perl is because some very smart people had an itch or two to scratch, and let us all have the results of their great work for free. That's called generosity.
If some of these very same people are now excited about other approaches to the problem, who are you to whine about them "breaking" things? Especially when the things you like and consider "good enough" are still available, for FREE, for you to use for the rest of your life?
When these very smart people go back to the drawing board and make something new, it usually results in something called progress.
"Ok, so Perl 5 will still be supported, but was it really so necessary to do the total rewrite and break the old code?"
Sorry, but until you are paying all these people for their time, it's really not yours to ask whether their projects are "necessary." If you don't feel like writing a new mysearchbot for Perl6, that's your business.
As for the Microsoft example, don't you think it's a little naive to consider the business model of a huge software company and the motivations of open-source developers in the same breath?
"When you rewrite you are abandoning history and condemning yourself to relive it."
Sweet. I wish you'd put that in a <blink> tag.
Um...Why do we want a 3D desktop?
So we can all wear those cool red/blue glasses at work!
Duh!
Here in chilly Budapest, Hungary, I pay US$58 (44 euros) per month for cable, 512 down 128 up. Performance is reasonably solid.
When I got it a year ago, DSL was not available in my neighborhood. DSL prices are about the same.
Odd that the Reuters article doesn't even mention the controversy currently surrounding SCO's actions.
I wonder whether mainstream journalists are just asleep at the wheel on this one, or whether maybe this is just a case of press release plus one paragraph of "context" (that Google is maybe gonna IPO).
Either way, depressing.
Why didn't they include ActivePerl?
In the article it rather sounds like they just assumed Python performance would be an indicator of performance for interpreted languages generally, but is there anything to back this up?
You hit the nail on the head.
Of course, India isn't the only place you could go - Hungary, where I live, is also a great outsourcing destination, even if it's a bit colder.
Or you could go to a smaller place in the US, away from the coasts, and cut your labor cost a lot as well. That might be nicer for you if you wanted to stay in the US and take advantage of its IT infrastructure, honest postal employees, and such.
But when I look around and see that here in Budapest I can hire a talented, experienced, multilingual IT professional for about the same as I would pay for an entry-level data-entry clerk back in San Francisco...
Also, it's a lot harder to make it sexy if it's her cap and not her top.
And the artists in question are Peter Fischli and David Weiss of Switzerland.
Who, for what it's worth, are household names in the art world.
Medium Answer: Pick one or more.
A) In our interplanetary explorations, at least until the shit hits the fan, we desire to be like doctors, and First do no harm.
B) We would like to know about any Mars Bacteria and get some nice samples so we can eliminate it before the shit hits the fan and we start colonizing, because you never know what it might do to us otherwise.
C) Given the realistic timeframe for manned Mars trips, even with China-US competition, we are worried about the higher life forms that might evolve from said bacteria before we actually send anyone up. There is reason for concern.
D) Cowboy Neal on Mars.
OK, you seem a lot better informed than I, so:
Why exactly is the clock an expected point of failure?
It seems to me that a super-sturdy clock is the smallest of challenges in a mission like this. I'm glad they considered the possibility of its failure, but can you or someone please clue me in as to why the clock of all things is so fragile?
Unless it auto-timezones to Martian time and finds itself in the year 2038...
So you admit the Martians are hostile!!
*cough* *marsattacks* *cough* *waroftheworlds* *cough* *marvin* *cough*
Sorry, but we're talking about Mars here. We are the Aliens, the Martians are not.
If the Martians come down here chanting "Don't run, we are your friends!" and shooting everyone in sight, well, then they are the Aliens.
Don't get all xenophobic when you are the xeno.
Two words: Fischli & Weiss.
'Nuff said. Look it up if you don't know.
But OK, I can't resist, so:
I remember when the thing came out and there was the point that they "cheated" once or twice. I believe the "cheating" was less about physics than about photography - maybe the speakers?
In any case I hope Peter and David were paid well for this, 'cause if not then it's a rip-off of the highest order.
Not that they'd find that a bad thing necessarily... we artists are usually tickled pink to be plagiarized by Big Capital, and it certainly doesn't hurt our prices.
Since I live in both the "traditional" (painting) art world and the "new media" (computer/network/etc) world, I always find it amusing how people in the latter tend to be more ignorant of the former than the other way around. Even though there is always a lot of osmotic exchange of ideas between the two.
As general advice to non-geeky cafe owners, your is perfect. (Assuming you've locked down abusable ports.)
The only problem I see is that people might well end up with default passwords on their routers, all ports open, etc.
The main objective of the cafe owner may well be getting people to buy more coffee, but a lot of smaller neighborhood cafes are run by people who are very passionate about the environment they create- less to get more customers than to get the kind of people they like to have in their establishment.
And anyone looking to Slashdot for advice in helping them out is probably going to get more excited by a geekier, if higher-overhead, version.