I've always wondered, if cows produce so much methane, is there a way to capture it and use it as an energy source?
I guess capturing methane from cows is a non-trivial exercise, but it sure sounds fun. I want to drive around and see cows wearing crazy helmets with gas tanks on their back like bovine scuba divers doing it wrong.
One thing that I'm interested in is, if the U of Wisconsin has a big IT course or business management - is this bad press for it?
If I was choosing unis, and heard about a massive spectacular project failure at that university - why would I want to go there and have them teach me about similar things?
(Seems likely that the departments that cause these problems are highly different to the ones doing the teaching, but it seems like an interesting thought experiment:)
Also- I personally believe statistics aren't all they're cracked up to be. When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
Right, but when you're in a car, you've got zero control over the personal decisions made by the thousands of other people that are sharing the road with you, who - quite literally - hold your life in their hands.
I have exactly zero hesitation getting on a plane every time. I'm much more worried about the other cars on the road that I see speeding, weaving in and out of traffic at 100km/h, tailgating, and generally behaving like total assholes.
We moved 80 terabytes of data last month to users all over the world (gaming files, demos, patches, MMO clients, etc).
We rely on ad revenue to be able to do this. We're one of the ONLY sites that lets people download for free, in a 2 click process, with no waiting, and what I think are modest ads.
There's not a lot of 'free' sites that can support this kind of operation. Most of them (fileplanet, shack, etc) all charge, because it's expensive.
I'd rather keep running our site so users can get this stuff for free, and all they have to pay is copping the occasional add in the face every so often.
I feel the same when I read slashdot - I actually got the slashdot option to hide their ads. I don't WANT to hide their ads. I want to keep using slashdot for free, and I'm happy to absorb ads for it.
As always I'll get modded down to shit for posting something that's not as rabidly anti-ad as everyone else that feels like they have the right to just do whatever the fuck they feel like because it's the Internet, but whatever.
Ads keep a lot of websites free. Good sites like this one.
Wow.. my experience with Office is totally different. I used OOo exclusively for the last 2-3 years until I got Office 2K7 at work. After fiddling with it a bit I almost immediately fell in love with it; I found it so easy to use (the ribbon just clicks for me for everything).
I was sure I'd still use OOo for everything but MS Word and Excel load faster and I find muchmuchmuch more intuitive to use when compared to OOo. Don't get me wrong; I hate myself for it - I love OOo and am all about open data formats, but really when it comes to Getting Shit Done, MS Office works better for me (even writing this I sound like an MS shill and assume modding down is in my immediate future, but if you read my post history you'll see I'm not).
I am farrrr from an Office power-user and I find Office 2k7 the easiest thing for me to get the most out of at a high level.
Re: Outlook - I run it non-stop from the moment my computer boots to the moment I need to reboot for a Windows update (usually a week:), with no problems at all due to memory leaks or performance issues. I'm running it connected to Zimbra so it's using the Outlook plugin to talk to the Zimbra server stuff; maybe it sucks more under Exchange.
Three people saying "that your right to download movies for free is the same as your right to sit on the bus regardless of your skin color" is three too many.
Given that, I'd be very curious to see how it would fare under a limited data plan. Having to think about the data you are using really crimps the casual and spontaneous nature of the use(just as, when I was on dialup, "being online" was a separate state from "being on the computer" even though the dial-in process only took a couple of minutes, tops.
As always, Australia is ahead of the game with data limits!
My brother has an iPhone with a 200 (or 250 - can't remember) MB data limit. I think its AUD$49 a month; excess fees look like they're AUD$0.35 / MB.
He uses it all the time; never worries about using it, and never comes close to using 200GB of data. Seriously, you'd have to be really, really whaling on it more than he does to use more than 200GB of data a month (unless you were tethering and using it on your PC).
I don't really know how 3G works but I would have guessed it people were using it constantly for frivolous purposes then it would reduce the efficiency of the network? Maybe 3G is magic and that's not an issue, but I'm all for data caps if that's the case.
Doesn't this just reek of a clever long-term business plan by Microsoft?
Maybe they realised, years ago, everyone was really happy with XP. Holy shit! They'd made the perfect product! Noone would ever want or need to upgrade again!
So they intentionally release Vista as a turd. Everyone hates on it and noone decides to upgrade.
Then they release the new hotness of Windows 7 - compared to Vista, it's amazing! Everyone gives it good reviews. Why/wouldn't/ you install it? It's SO much better than Vista!
Everyone has, meanwhile, forgotten they're happy on XP and just wants to get back on the upgrade bandwagon.
I've spent the last 6 months looking at Exchange vs Zimbra; I have a fair idea. I know Exchange is superior in almost all respects. But I'm prepared to put a bit of money (and more importantly and costly in the long run: time) to Zimbra because it's ALMOST good enough.
The shared hosting arrangements can easily have dozens and dozens of "servers" operating on the same physical box.
Dozens?! I worked at a web host like 8 years ago and we were running up to 400 servers shared on a single box. I assume you can squeeze on a hell of a lot more these days!
As a developer you should be fully aware of the fact that you can extract the files from the MSI if you really want to. I'll help though. For most MSI files a simple:
msiexec/a filename.msi/qb TARGETDIR=C:\tmpdir
Also, 7zip seems to be able to extract.msi's as well like they were ZIP files:
In both the above cases, assuming it is possible to do, it won't really affect the lawyers, but instead office workers at the firm and bank(s). So they are hassling people that have nothing to do directly with the MPAA/RIAA/etc.
I can't believe I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments to find one person that actually seemed to get this.
In addition to not being responsible for copyright laws, the lawyers were just doing what they were paid to do by the media industries. They're just trying to earn a buck. If you're going to be a jackass about it, at least point your jackassness to people like the MPAA/RIAA - or even better, the lobbyists and politicians that take their money and get us things like 70+ year copyright extensions.
If I was a lawyer and TPB came to me now asking for representation, I'd just be worried that if I did something wrong these guys would find some clever techno-geek way of ruining my business later and would be much less inclined to take them as a client.
It is because it was good enough, at the right time.
This is such an awesome, succinct way of explaining the sometimes-inexplicable success of so many things. I will be sure to use it again!
I actually don't think it's too late for Theora to have an impact though.
The big thing is the tag that is being considered for HTML5. If Firefox and Opera and Chrome all bust out solid support in release builds soon, we'll be converting our video library to support it (catalogue of video game trailers on ausgamers.com - I realise one site isn't enough, but if others feel the same...)
The big roadblock is IE - even with IE8's improved 'standards compliance' I can't see them wanting to encourage any other video streaming stuff when they're pushing silverlight so hard.
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though. Thanks to MPAA/RIAA and various ISPs, P2P, especially torrent is an issue for large companies. If Apple used P2P to distribute very large OS updates (e.g. combo ones, XCode), we could blame MS for not using the option. Ask Apple why they don't use.
I don't want these companies to be using my Internet connection to distribute their software and enhancing their profits. I don't want my updates to be reliant on everyone else seeding properly.
What happens if I'm updating an old box and there's like, one seed running at microsoft or apple.com and I get 2kbytes/second because I'm in the middle of nowhere?!
Torrenting also has implications to their EULAs, many of which state you're not allowed to redistribute. Torrenting, imho, implies that you are granted a redistribution right, which is something that I suspect they'd prefer to avoid.
I'm not taking it seriously enough to look up the citations, but Science magazine had an article a while back investigating a Chinese doctor who claimed to be treating spinal cord injured patients, and it turned out that his patients weren't getting better and he hadn't published anything significant.
I actually saw a documentary on TV about this where there was some British and/or US doctors who went to China to look at patients. I came in like 1/2 way through so missed all the start and have no idea what it was, but IIRC the net result was they left unsatisfied that this was the 'miracle cure' that was being claimed.
That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?
I'd rather not buy Quake 3 again (it's not just "getting a copy" of Steam, you have to buy it) and just enjoy Quake Live.
ioquake is a fucking awesome project, but seriously
I was going to mod you down, but I thought education might be better - the Australian government has pretty decent views on privacy. More information is available on the privacy site, but to the best of my knowledge our laws are pretty good for keeping your personal data private.
I suspect you're getting mixed up with the Australian Internet filtering thing, which is a censorship issue, not a privacy issue. AFAIK, under Australian privacy laws, there's no privacy implications in this stupid filter scheme.
There is a huge difference between wanting your country out of a war & wanting your country to *lose* a war.
At the risk of sounding like I'm supporting anyone that wants to lose a war, I'd point out that since Japan and Germany lost WW2, they haven't started or really be involved in any other major conflicts.
Compare that with the USA, that have never suffered a defeat like that... maybe losing a war is what the USA needs to stop mixing it up with everyone else all over the globe.
(disclaimer: yep, I know it took the Germans a couple of goes before they gave up:)
The rapid dissemination of information that twitter provides can be a good thing (or at least so I read on Bad Astronomer, I still haven't been to twitter after the first time I went there to see what it was), but seriously, the same rules apply as with anything you read on the Internet.
If you're a twitter user and you feel the need to let people know about things, at least link them to a reputable information source. No, an obvious conspiracy site saying this is a terrorist attack is not an information source.
If my mobile provider did this (not that I'd ever access TPB on my mobile), I would INSTANTLY call them and unsubscribe my service and tell them the reason why.
Unless they start losing revenue they're going to keep doing shit like this. Once they find users will stand for having their rights trampled on they'll just keep doing it and doing it.
Heh, how do you define success? I think it's different to how I do it.
Further, pretty much everyone that I've spoken to that has tried Win7 (even Vista-haters) have said it is far and away better than at least Vista and have certainly given me the impression that it's going to be a worthy successor to XP.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered, if cows produce so much methane, is there a way to capture it and use it as an energy source?
I guess capturing methane from cows is a non-trivial exercise, but it sure sounds fun. I want to drive around and see cows wearing crazy helmets with gas tanks on their back like bovine scuba divers doing it wrong.
One thing that I'm interested in is, if the U of Wisconsin has a big IT course or business management - is this bad press for it?
If I was choosing unis, and heard about a massive spectacular project failure at that university - why would I want to go there and have them teach me about similar things?
(Seems likely that the departments that cause these problems are highly different to the ones doing the teaching, but it seems like an interesting thought experiment :)
Also- I personally believe statistics aren't all they're cracked up to be. When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
Right, but when you're in a car, you've got zero control over the personal decisions made by the thousands of other people that are sharing the road with you, who - quite literally - hold your life in their hands.
I have exactly zero hesitation getting on a plane every time. I'm much more worried about the other cars on the road that I see speeding, weaving in and out of traffic at 100km/h, tailgating, and generally behaving like total assholes.
ads are enough to deal with for the content.
Holy fucking shit, a statement by someone on slashdot that got modded +5 insightful that refers to using ads as a way to supplement a free service!
I'd much rather ad-supported services than to have to pay for content. By miles. By such a long shot it's not even funny. No, I don't block ads.
Tech demo? I've gotten more enjoyable game hours out of L4D than I have any other game for about 3 years
Which will drive people to free sites.
We moved 80 terabytes of data last month to users all over the world (gaming files, demos, patches, MMO clients, etc).
We rely on ad revenue to be able to do this. We're one of the ONLY sites that lets people download for free, in a 2 click process, with no waiting, and what I think are modest ads.
There's not a lot of 'free' sites that can support this kind of operation. Most of them (fileplanet, shack, etc) all charge, because it's expensive.
I'd rather keep running our site so users can get this stuff for free, and all they have to pay is copping the occasional add in the face every so often.
I feel the same when I read slashdot - I actually got the slashdot option to hide their ads. I don't WANT to hide their ads. I want to keep using slashdot for free, and I'm happy to absorb ads for it.
As always I'll get modded down to shit for posting something that's not as rabidly anti-ad as everyone else that feels like they have the right to just do whatever the fuck they feel like because it's the Internet, but whatever.
Ads keep a lot of websites free. Good sites like this one.
Wow.. my experience with Office is totally different. I used OOo exclusively for the last 2-3 years until I got Office 2K7 at work. After fiddling with it a bit I almost immediately fell in love with it; I found it so easy to use (the ribbon just clicks for me for everything).
I was sure I'd still use OOo for everything but MS Word and Excel load faster and I find muchmuchmuch more intuitive to use when compared to OOo. Don't get me wrong; I hate myself for it - I love OOo and am all about open data formats, but really when it comes to Getting Shit Done, MS Office works better for me (even writing this I sound like an MS shill and assume modding down is in my immediate future, but if you read my post history you'll see I'm not).
I am farrrr from an Office power-user and I find Office 2k7 the easiest thing for me to get the most out of at a high level.
Re: Outlook - I run it non-stop from the moment my computer boots to the moment I need to reboot for a Windows update (usually a week :), with no problems at all due to memory leaks or performance issues. I'm running it connected to Zimbra so it's using the Outlook plugin to talk to the Zimbra server stuff; maybe it sucks more under Exchange.
Three people saying "that your right to download movies for free is the same as your right to sit on the bus regardless of your skin color" is three too many.
Given that, I'd be very curious to see how it would fare under a limited data plan. Having to think about the data you are using really crimps the casual and spontaneous nature of the use(just as, when I was on dialup, "being online" was a separate state from "being on the computer" even though the dial-in process only took a couple of minutes, tops.
As always, Australia is ahead of the game with data limits!
My brother has an iPhone with a 200 (or 250 - can't remember) MB data limit. I think its AUD$49 a month; excess fees look like they're AUD$0.35 / MB.
He uses it all the time; never worries about using it, and never comes close to using 200GB of data. Seriously, you'd have to be really, really whaling on it more than he does to use more than 200GB of data a month (unless you were tethering and using it on your PC).
I don't really know how 3G works but I would have guessed it people were using it constantly for frivolous purposes then it would reduce the efficiency of the network? Maybe 3G is magic and that's not an issue, but I'm all for data caps if that's the case.
Doesn't this just reek of a clever long-term business plan by Microsoft?
Maybe they realised, years ago, everyone was really happy with XP. Holy shit! They'd made the perfect product! Noone would ever want or need to upgrade again!
So they intentionally release Vista as a turd. Everyone hates on it and noone decides to upgrade.
Then they release the new hotness of Windows 7 - compared to Vista, it's amazing! Everyone gives it good reviews. Why /wouldn't/ you install it? It's SO much better than Vista!
Everyone has, meanwhile, forgotten they're happy on XP and just wants to get back on the upgrade bandwagon.
A CUNNING PLAN!
I've spent the last 6 months looking at Exchange vs Zimbra; I have a fair idea. I know Exchange is superior in almost all respects. But I'm prepared to put a bit of money (and more importantly and costly in the long run: time) to Zimbra because it's ALMOST good enough.
I wouldn't call it lies - I'd call it ignorance
The shared hosting arrangements can easily have dozens and dozens of "servers" operating on the same physical box.
Dozens?! I worked at a web host like 8 years ago and we were running up to 400 servers shared on a single box. I assume you can squeeze on a hell of a lot more these days!
As a developer you should be fully aware of the fact that you can extract the files from the MSI if you really want to. I'll help though. For most MSI files a simple:
msiexec /a filename.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\tmpdir
Also, 7zip seems to be able to extract .msi's as well like they were ZIP files:
http://www.7-zip.org/
I just tried it with a .msi I had lying around and was able to right-click-extract it to a new folder really easily.
In both the above cases, assuming it is possible to do, it won't really affect the lawyers, but instead office workers at the firm and bank(s). So they are hassling people that have nothing to do directly with the MPAA/RIAA/etc.
I can't believe I had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the comments to find one person that actually seemed to get this.
In addition to not being responsible for copyright laws, the lawyers were just doing what they were paid to do by the media industries. They're just trying to earn a buck. If you're going to be a jackass about it, at least point your jackassness to people like the MPAA/RIAA - or even better, the lobbyists and politicians that take their money and get us things like 70+ year copyright extensions.
If I was a lawyer and TPB came to me now asking for representation, I'd just be worried that if I did something wrong these guys would find some clever techno-geek way of ruining my business later and would be much less inclined to take them as a client.
How do you figure that?
Zimbra for a 50 seat license: US$1,400
Exchange 2007 Standard with 5 CALs: AUD$2234 (USD1,714.93 at the time of writing).
The site I'm looking at only has CALs available in units of 5, and they're USD$576 for a block of 5.
And that's just a CAL - do you need a license for Outlook as well? I thought you did.
It is because it was good enough, at the right time.
This is such an awesome, succinct way of explaining the sometimes-inexplicable success of so many things. I will be sure to use it again!
I actually don't think it's too late for Theora to have an impact though.
The big thing is the tag that is being considered for HTML5. If Firefox and Opera and Chrome all bust out solid support in release builds soon, we'll be converting our video library to support it (catalogue of video game trailers on ausgamers.com - I realise one site isn't enough, but if others feel the same...)
The big roadblock is IE - even with IE8's improved 'standards compliance' I can't see them wanting to encourage any other video streaming stuff when they're pushing silverlight so hard.
Interesting times though.
Nobody can blame them for not offering a torrent though. Thanks to MPAA/RIAA and various ISPs, P2P, especially torrent is an issue for large companies. If Apple used P2P to distribute very large OS updates (e.g. combo ones, XCode), we could blame MS for not using the option. Ask Apple why they don't use.
I don't want these companies to be using my Internet connection to distribute their software and enhancing their profits. I don't want my updates to be reliant on everyone else seeding properly.
What happens if I'm updating an old box and there's like, one seed running at microsoft or apple.com and I get 2kbytes/second because I'm in the middle of nowhere?!
Torrenting also has implications to their EULAs, many of which state you're not allowed to redistribute. Torrenting, imho, implies that you are granted a redistribution right, which is something that I suspect they'd prefer to avoid.
I'm not taking it seriously enough to look up the citations, but Science magazine had an article a while back investigating a Chinese doctor who claimed to be treating spinal cord injured patients, and it turned out that his patients weren't getting better and he hadn't published anything significant.
I actually saw a documentary on TV about this where there was some British and/or US doctors who went to China to look at patients. I came in like 1/2 way through so missed all the start and have no idea what it was, but IIRC the net result was they left unsatisfied that this was the 'miracle cure' that was being claimed.
Had a quick Google but couldn't find anything
That little sotto voce whine about the ads in Quake Live is really lame. It's a free game. Are you seriously so obsessed with hating ads you'll pass up the opportunity to get a free game (which, by all reports from amongst my Quake-fan friends, is excellent) and cop the occasional ad?
I'd rather not buy Quake 3 again (it's not just "getting a copy" of Steam, you have to buy it) and just enjoy Quake Live.
ioquake is a fucking awesome project, but seriously
I was going to mod you down, but I thought education might be better - the Australian government has pretty decent views on privacy. More information is available on the privacy site, but to the best of my knowledge our laws are pretty good for keeping your personal data private.
I suspect you're getting mixed up with the Australian Internet filtering thing, which is a censorship issue, not a privacy issue. AFAIK, under Australian privacy laws, there's no privacy implications in this stupid filter scheme.
There is a huge difference between wanting your country out of a war & wanting your country to *lose* a war.
At the risk of sounding like I'm supporting anyone that wants to lose a war, I'd point out that since Japan and Germany lost WW2, they haven't started or really be involved in any other major conflicts.
Compare that with the USA, that have never suffered a defeat like that... maybe losing a war is what the USA needs to stop mixing it up with everyone else all over the globe.
(disclaimer: yep, I know it took the Germans a couple of goes before they gave up :)
News at 11
The rapid dissemination of information that twitter provides can be a good thing (or at least so I read on Bad Astronomer, I still haven't been to twitter after the first time I went there to see what it was), but seriously, the same rules apply as with anything you read on the Internet.
If you're a twitter user and you feel the need to let people know about things, at least link them to a reputable information source. No, an obvious conspiracy site saying this is a terrorist attack is not an information source.
If my mobile provider did this (not that I'd ever access TPB on my mobile), I would INSTANTLY call them and unsubscribe my service and tell them the reason why.
Unless they start losing revenue they're going to keep doing shit like this. Once they find users will stand for having their rights trampled on they'll just keep doing it and doing it.
Send a message the only way they'll understand.
Heh, how do you define success? I think it's different to how I do it.
Further, pretty much everyone that I've spoken to that has tried Win7 (even Vista-haters) have said it is far and away better than at least Vista and have certainly given me the impression that it's going to be a worthy successor to XP.