I haven't seen any, and while dialpad.com apparently uses java, it still requires Win 9X. Is this just lazy programming on the part of dialpad.com, a fault in java, or a fault in the java implementation on linux? It seems that java's "write once, run anywhere" will never become a reality, but rather Transmeta's "build once, run anything" will prevail.
I'm always a bit skeptic when I hear buzz words like "multiculturism." I'm really not very interested in black/yellow/red/green/blue culture. I don't think this means I'm a racist, it just means I don't care. This is an effective definition of "tolerance," not caring. And I think this is the approach to take to racism.
As long as the official position of the government/U.N./whatever is that race/etc. does not determine one's value as a human being, this is enough for me. Learning about the specifics of a culture does not make me more tolerant, it simply explains to me what _one_ culture is. The point is to realize that none of this matters. The point is to accept one's culture _without_ needing to learn how and why and when one does it. What people need to be is intelligent. What people don't need is relatively useless information.
What exactly do you mean, anyway, by "multiculurism" in the Linux community? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a single serious comment in the "community" degragating someone's ethnicity/etc. Mostly we have wars about coding styles and text editors, which are very obviously unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) issues. For the most part, one's racial identity is obscured on the internet and this is a good thing. People in the Linux community are judged by their skill. This may not perhaps be "multiculturism," but it is colorblindness.
Of course the standard disclaimer is that I'm a WASP American, so what the hell do I know about culture.
I thought these two articles were relatively well-done considering the intended audiences. There's a big difference between the average ABC News viewer and the average/. reader. ABC News shouldn't have the same depth of complexity, as the whole point of TV news is to take a complicated issue and explain it in terms that the average Joe can understand. This can be done poorly, but sometimes it can be done well. I think these two articles are done relatively well. In particular, the World News Tonight article gave a good summary of the good/evil qualities of h/cracking (i.e., cracking reveals security flaws that can be fixed).
Yes, the majority of media coverage about hackers/crackers is really paranoid, but this one wasn't so bad.
I could talk about Fight Club for hours on end (yes, even though the first and second rules are that you're not supposed to). At least temporarily it has replaced Taxi Driver as my favorite movie. Hm, my two favorite movies are about young white males frustrated about life who turn to violence. Is that an indicator on those tests for possible "warning signs" about violence in teenagers?
I'm glad to see that looking through this thread, I haven't seen any bad comments about Fight Club, because there's been an awful lot of it in the media. I think it primarily stems from the fact that there are different "levels" in the movie. At least there are different levels that the viewer can approach the film with. One, the mindless consumer, two, the mindless anarchist, and three, the free thinking, ethical person. These are essentially the three "stages" the narrator goes through in the film, sequentially. Unfortunately, I think that if you come into the movie thinking at level one, it's very possible to only realize its transitition to anarchy. Or if you come in at level three, it's _possible_ to think the whole movie is a useless exercise in the obvious. This seems to be the stance many reviewers have taken, adding that it just tends to promote anarchy because someone like Brad Pitt is so likable. One criticism I heard is that while the movie implies that it is necessary to experience violence to realize it's bad, you shouldn't need to. Perhaps this is so in an idealized world, but not in the dronelike, pathetic world of the first 20 minutes of Fight Club, which is all too similar to America today.
Yes, I realize this whole level analogy is really broad and imprecise, but I think it makes sense. I'm sure if you haven't seen the movie, it all makes no sense at all (but that just means you should see it!) It simply seems to me that this structure of the movie, which is very effective if you understand it (is that a paradox?), has been misinterpreted by the media and caused the movie to be a relative failure (yes, it's funny that a movie can gross $30 million plus and still be considered a failure). I have yet to talk to anyone directly who has seen the movie that didn't like it. What I see more of is "Oh, I heard that sucks!!!"
If nothing else, if you disregard its political and psychological aspects, it's a masterpiece of sound and vision in a non-obvious special effects sense (Fight Club uses special effects to show enable amazing "camera" movement in and around a kitchen, a garage, or a trash can, not to show some stupid dinosaur or a space ship blowing up).
And if you're still not convinced, there is a CG PENGUIN in the movie that talks. PENGUIN == LINUX == SEE THE MOVIE.
On another note, for those you have seen the movie, READ THE BOOK. Or at least the last two chapters, because most of the movie is similar to the novel, except for the end. Let's just say that something that seems inevitable as a result of physics at the end doesn't happen in the movie, but does in the book.
i think what people are afraid of is the fact that the napster client allows the world to relatively anonymously access a specific directory of your system. if there's any kind of security hole, it could be hacked to allow access to your _whole_ system (that's bad). it needs to be as secure as an ftp daemon.
i think the non-ratio format of napster doesn't encourage people to post false mp3 files. you mostly see this on mp3 ftp servers where you need to upload something before you can download. with napster, there's no benefit to this, aside from causing chaos.
Since the link on the/. story didn't have an http://, I had to type in the link manually and at first I type just "purdueonline.com", which leads to the homepage for Global Transit Logistics, Inc. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that (as far as a legal sense), but it seems odd from a practical sense. Do you know know why this is, ttyp0? Is it just a mix up on your hosting services end?
gasp! hurry up and register it! _never_ mention a catchy phrase with.com after it without realizing that someone else is going to beat you to the punch.
yes, but most WORD users have no idea how to do this. just because you CAN change it doesn't change the fact microsoft is trying to sell people products that necessary only due to the clutter of their own products.
the ironic part of this device, and the test page for it, is the total and absolute useless clutter they show in the toolbar of MS WORD. how many functions does a damned word processor need and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see when i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need some $200 mouse to simulate the same thing.
If she doesn't have the money to pay off a $70K debt, then she never would have been given a credit limit high enough to charge $70K on two cards.
well, never say never. i'm a college student with a $1500 credit limit. i don't even make that much money with my on campus job in 3 months. if i maxed out my credit card (which of course i wouldn't), my parents would have to bail me out. perhaps that's just what the credit card companies are thinking, but my parents are not cosingers on my card or anything like that.
this is my first credit card, as well.
as far as i know, they didn't do any background check on the information i put in. they didn't even ask for enough information to verify that i do work and make X amount of money or pay X amount of money for my housing, unless they have some inside connection with social security numbers.
it just seems to me that credit card companies are a bit too willing to raise limits and give out credit cards _sometimes_, because they know they can charge 20% interest or whatever and it's really better for them if the customers don't pay on time.
Credit card companies get a percentage of your purchase. If you charge $100 at a store with your Visa card, Visa get $4 and the store gets $96 (4% used to be the number, I don't know if this is still accurate).
yes, i had forgotten about that, but this number is quickly dwarfed by monthly interest of usually at least 1% for someone who only pays the minimum necessary payment.
i'd be willing to bet they make more money off of interest than off of those automatic charges, but of course i could be wrong. according to this link the average household has $7,000 in credit card debt and pay $1,000 in interest and fees. of course, this i don't know how reliable this source is as i just found it in a quick search, but it sounds about right to me.
it's just hard to feel sorry for a huge credit card company losing a mere 70k or an online casino losing out on 70k they charged for someone to click a few buttons.
i've never used online gambling, but exactly how did she get 70k into debt only using her credit card? i know that some relatively wealthy people have 70k limits and it's not that unheard of, but most people don't have nearly that much. my parents are pretty upper-middle class and they "only" have a 10k limit.
does the gambling company simply ask for your credit card number, let you do your gambling and then at the at the end of the month they charge you for your losses (or, less likely, give you credit for your winnings?). if she doesn't even have 70k worth of _credit_, it is partially the casino's fault for letting her get that far in debt without checking her card.
i've never used online gambling, so i don't know how it works. but if this monthly statement approach is how they do it, it's simply a bad idea. a much better idea would be to buy "chips" with the credit (though probably better with "real" money). of course, you can always get cash advances on credit cards, so only allowing "real" cash won't work completely (though it would stop the completely on-a-whim things).
even if she did have a 70k limit, she probably shouldn't've had one. i'm not saying it's not her fault, but this ruling is a stiff warning to the credit card companies and the casino companies to be more careful about who they give credit to. credit card companies live on people who can't afford the credit they give them. if everyone could, they would pay their monthly statements in full, never pay any interest, never give any money to the credit card companies. obviously, this is not so.
no, i'm not delighted about the ruling and i don't agree with it, but it's not necessarily all bad.
this is one of those things my wonderful senior year high school teacher used to talk about. we would talk about things like if all words are really "images" in the brain, like as if there's a mental stamp we have inside that we "think" of every time we say "run", that could really be translated into any language... very interesting, but it's really hard to out-think your own brain and try to figure out what it's doing.
there was an exchange student from germany in that class and she said that when she first came here, she would "think in german", but eventually she found it easier to "think in english" when she was going to speak english.
i'm a very poor spanish student (which have to take at college due to general requirements blahblahblah) and i'm not at the point where i can really "think in spanish", so i "think in english" and of course i speak about ten times slower than good spanish speakers (those people they put on the listening tapes are so damn fast!).
if there is some kind of "universal" language that your brain thinks in, it must be really hidden from your conscious self, because i find it very difficult to think without words. but, of course, as my teacher would say, if you can't think without words, how could the first languages have been developed?
so of course we must be _able_ to think without words. i guess we just make up our own internal mental representations for things or concepts, but once we learn language, this is probably not used.
as far as the project itself is concerned... this is going to be _necessary_ at some point for language translation (though of course i think everyone should speak english, like almost "everyone" does already). if you have just have italian-english and german-french, etc,etc. translation algorithms, it's going to get ridiculous. n^2, where n is the number of languages you want to translate between.
well, i guess i just said win95's GUI is more stable in a mode of diplomacy toward the person i was replying to. i wasn't really specific in saying what it was more stable than, but i'd say that enlightment, at this point, does some pretty odd things sometimes that don't always make sense. meaning stability in terms of a user-interface predictability standpoint. as far as the win95 GUI itself crashing, it's really just hard to tell what is crashing in win95, because it's usually everything that goes down.
i feel much more comfortable using the win95 GUI than using enlightenment, but this may just be a lack of experience. but i like windowmaker better than both of them.
enlightenment is only _one_ of the many GUIs that are available for linux/x11. enlightenment's stated goal, as far as i can remember, is to be ultimately configurable and have every feature you could ever imagine. i've used it in the past and have found it too complex (and sometimes too slow) to bother with, but there's nothing wrong with one GUI being huge.
i use window maker, which is quite configurable (in a "feel" sense), though it's not as visually morphing as enlightenment is. if you want something that's lighter, i would suggest window maker wholeheartedly.
while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.
but the point is, if enlightment isn't for you, that doesn't mean anything against linux. that's the beauty of linux. just pick a different GUI! (or of course the standard line "write your own!").
i'm a sophmore computer science student at nyu (yeah, who ever knew good ole liberal new york university had a cs department?). i have an work-study job where i learn all about perl and javascript and such which is useful for your resume, but i still like my classes. i guess it seems like i'm learning more at work than at school, but i also kinda like the general liberal arts education.
as many others have said, in one way or another, college is about learning _how_ to learn. no computer science graduate is going to stop learning after he gradutes, you shouldn't either. if you're really that hot right now, maybe you shouldn't go to college at all for a degree and just take classes or learn on your own for specific languages. however, there's nothing wrong with learning indepth computer science theory and also how to write essays well. you don't want to be a hardcore hacker forever, do you?
a "normal" college is also a good place to get drunk a lot. if you like that sort of thing. i think i'm starting to like it too much.
I'm posting using the QNX demo and their browser. I dialed into my ISP, all I needed was the telephone number and user/password. It asked for the DNS server, but I just put in something bogus knowing that I usually get it from my ISP automatically. So now I'm browsing slashdot and it looks all right. Not wonderful, but definitely usable.
If they could get the flicker down on the scrolling and add java support, this would be wonderful for webTV-like appliances. This is not to say that I actually think those appliances are any good, but, um, yeah. But I don't know exactly what market their aiming for.
I'm just quite impressed by the ease and functionality of this little demo. I don't know how the real OS looks, but I probably wouldn't be willing to pay for it, simply because it seems like Linux will be what applications get written for (aside from Windows) in the near future.
Yeah, it's basically a 30 minute diversion from homework, but I think it was well worth it.
i got a question in which was basically asking him how red hat plans to keep users up to date with all of the constant new versions, but specifically for modem users. of course, they took out the part about modems when they asked my question and he just said "they can connect to our ftp site for free or pay a subscriber free and get priority high bandwidth access!" which defeated the point of my question. oh well.
anyone else misread the dept at first and thought it said "the _hated_ wonder"? heh.
the article mentions that freebsd is linux's "rival" and that some linux users would be angered that apple chose freebsd instead of linux. i don't think a reasonable linux zealot would really think that. i would much rather see any type of unix-like, open source OS than the dreadful regular macOS, in which the GUI is so painstakingly integrated into the OS that it drives me absolutely nuts. even moreso than windows95.
freebsd is a rival of linux, perhaps, but it's a friendly rivalry or at least it should be.
also, it was interesting to see good ol' rob referenced in the article. he's becoming quite the open-source geek celebrity.
nowhere does it say that they're "tied" to a specific environment. and what do you mean by "for creativity a mac can't be beat"? i'm not an expert on macs by any degree, but what software is there on macintosh that doesn't exist or there isn't a very similar replacement for on windows or something else (and the sunray can run windows apps)?
the fact of the matter is that there's absolutely no reason to have full-fledged computers on every desktop in schools. especially with windows and macs, it's much too easy for rebellious teens to mess with the systems and it causes a complete administration headache. with windows,you have to buy third-party software to have any kind of multi-user security. it's probably the same with macs (though i do not know for sure). in high school, i was very often the person who was called upon to fix windows computers that people messed up by mistake or on purpose. it's a very annoying, consuming task.
plus, it's extremely expensive to upgrade every three years, etc, etc. from what i've heard about it,the sun ray sounds like the perfect solution.
it is important for children to have access to computers in school, but it doesn't have to be a technology training atmosphere with the perfect mix of different computers. i doubt that most casuals users of computers couldn't tell the difference between KDE and windows.
i really have yet to read a single comment that convinces me this is a bad idea.
the real question is should you feel entitled to a special title just because you spent more time in school or did something that impressed some university? when i left my high school, the principal and all of the vice principals were "doctors". it's actually getting quite common these days, relatively. i think our good ol' modest linux figurehead would prefer simply "linus".
however, some good linux propaganda would be:
Bill Gates: College dropout. Linus Torvalds: Doctor.
Who do you want behind your system?
of course this is pressuming bill gates never got an honorary doctorate and he probably has. damn it.
I live in Pennsylvania and there are so many damned specialized license plates that it's really starting to get annoying. For example, if you donate money to some "save the animals!" thing, you get a license plate with an owl on it. There are several variations of that theme. Then there's another one for D.A.R.E., one for every public university, and various military ones (I suppose I shouldn't whine too much about those). And there are probably others I don't know about.
The link from the Wired story that has the actual picture of the plate says that that "Virginia offers more than 150 specialized plates...". 150!?!? That's ridiculous! Isn't the primary point of license plates to identify the car for legal purposes? How is a Virginia cop supposed to recognize 150 different license plates so he knows that one or another isn't a fake? What do you say when you see a hit-and-run or something?
cop: Did you see the license plate? you: Yeah. It was 32DFJ-23. cop: What state? you: Uh, I dunno. It had a picture of a rabbit, I think. Or maybe it was a Klansman. All I know is that he had a carrot or a flaming cross. cop: uh-huh.
Now I'm not really suggesting that these types of plates are going to enable people to remain anonymous from crimes (no security through obscurity!), but I'm just "nostalgic" (imagine that at 19 years old) for the days when Virginia's license plate was Virginia's license plate and they all looked the same. Do you have to pay to get a special "internet" license plate (probably)? It sounds like a stupid scheme to get more money from the super-consumers that the internet has contributed to. If you really need to express your personality to people behind you in traffic, just get a bumper sticker. It just seems really lame to try to pigeonhole your personality through some government-created license plate.
While perhaps making property taxes the basis for public education keeps the Feds out of local authority, property taxes has proven to be a _horrible_ way to fund education. People in lower-income areas, like cities, get poorly-paid teachers (read: bad teachers (no, of course not all of them)), unmaintained buildings, and as a result, poor people often stay poor and rich people often stay rich.
I was "lucky" enough to grow up in a relatively wealthy area of suburban Philadelphia and got a relatively good education. But even moving from one school district to another school district in the same county showed a serious discrepency between the financial capabilities between schools. My old school district was not horrible, but it had less advanced classes, no computers with Internet connectivity, and the year I left, they offered early retirement to a load of older teachers to hire new ones at about half the price.
My new school district, however, supported by a multitude of people moving into newly-built $250,000+ homes, was building new schools at an almost alarming rate, had ethernet connections in every room, and it was considered almost odd if you didn't take at least one or two AP classes (most of the upper-percentage students graduated with at least 16 college credits). I took AP computer science there in my senior year. The highest programming offered at my old school was, uh, programming in BASIC.
This is all, of course, unscientific evidence, but the simple fact is that rich areas get more money per student for education than poor areas do under the current system. It's just a bad idea.
have you visited yahoo recently? i tend to think that a lot of their revenue is starting to come from tie-in deals with web commerce companies. it seems like everytime you search for something that could be bought, you get a link for how to buy it through a yahoo-affiliated website. you click through, buy it, and yahoo gets a cut (at least in theory). this is not horribly evil or anything, but it's not something that slashdot.org could do as easily without losing its focus and annoying a lot of people. i doubt much of slashdot's revenue comes from its "affiliation" with amazon.com.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen any, and while dialpad.com apparently uses java, it still requires Win 9X. Is this just lazy programming on the part of dialpad.com, a fault in java, or a fault in the java implementation on linux? It seems that java's "write once, run anywhere" will never become a reality, but rather Transmeta's "build once, run anything" will prevail.
I'm always a bit skeptic when I hear buzz words like "multiculturism." I'm really not very interested in black/yellow/red/green/blue culture. I don't think this means I'm a racist, it just means I don't care. This is an effective definition of "tolerance," not caring. And I think this is the approach to take to racism.
As long as the official position of the government/U.N./whatever is that race/etc. does not determine one's value as a human being, this is enough for me. Learning about the specifics of a culture does not make me more tolerant, it simply explains to me what _one_ culture is. The point is to realize that none of this matters. The point is to accept one's culture _without_ needing to learn how and why and when one does it. What people need to be is intelligent. What people don't need is relatively useless information.
What exactly do you mean, anyway, by "multiculurism" in the Linux community? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen a single serious comment in the "community" degragating someone's ethnicity/etc. Mostly we have wars about coding styles and text editors, which are very obviously unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) issues. For the most part, one's racial identity is obscured on the internet and this is a good thing. People in the Linux community are judged by their skill. This may not perhaps be "multiculturism," but it is colorblindness.
Of course the standard disclaimer is that I'm a WASP American, so what the hell do I know about culture.
> read with a cup of Coke?
How could you possibly drink a closed-source beverage! You can't trust that they haven't put insecure flavoring in it!
I thought these two articles were relatively well-done considering the intended audiences. There's a big difference between the average ABC News viewer and the average /. reader. ABC News shouldn't have the same depth of complexity, as the whole point of TV news is to take a complicated issue and explain it in terms that the average Joe can understand. This can be done poorly, but sometimes it can be done well. I think these two articles are done relatively well. In particular, the World News Tonight article gave a good summary of the good/evil qualities of h/cracking (i.e., cracking reveals security flaws that can be fixed).
Yes, the majority of media coverage about hackers/crackers is really paranoid, but this one wasn't so bad.
I could talk about Fight Club for hours on end (yes, even though the first and second rules are that you're not supposed to). At least temporarily it has replaced Taxi Driver as my favorite movie. Hm, my two favorite movies are about young white males frustrated about life who turn to violence. Is that an indicator on those tests for possible "warning signs" about violence in teenagers?
I'm glad to see that looking through this thread, I haven't seen any bad comments about Fight Club, because there's been an awful lot of it in the media. I think it primarily stems from the fact that there are different "levels" in the movie. At least there are different levels that the viewer can approach the film with. One, the mindless consumer, two, the mindless anarchist, and three, the free thinking, ethical person. These are essentially the three "stages" the narrator goes through in the film, sequentially. Unfortunately, I think that if you come into the movie thinking at level one, it's very possible to only realize its transitition to anarchy. Or if you come in at level three, it's _possible_ to think the whole movie is a useless exercise in the obvious. This seems to be the stance many reviewers have taken, adding that it just tends to promote anarchy because someone like Brad Pitt is so likable. One criticism I heard is that while the movie implies that it is necessary to experience violence to realize it's bad, you shouldn't need to. Perhaps this is so in an idealized world, but not in the dronelike, pathetic world of the first 20 minutes of Fight Club, which is all too similar to America today.
Yes, I realize this whole level analogy is really broad and imprecise, but I think it makes sense. I'm sure if you haven't seen the movie, it all makes no sense at all (but that just means you should see it!) It simply seems to me that this structure of the movie, which is very effective if you understand it (is that a paradox?), has been misinterpreted by the media and caused the movie to be a relative failure (yes, it's funny that a movie can gross $30 million plus and still be considered a failure). I have yet to talk to anyone directly who has seen the movie that didn't like it. What I see more of is "Oh, I heard that sucks!!!"
If nothing else, if you disregard its political and psychological aspects, it's a masterpiece of sound and vision in a non-obvious special effects sense (Fight Club uses special effects to show enable amazing "camera" movement in and around a kitchen, a garage, or a trash can, not to show some stupid dinosaur or a space ship blowing up).
And if you're still not convinced, there is a CG PENGUIN in the movie that talks. PENGUIN == LINUX == SEE THE MOVIE.
On another note, for those you have seen the movie, READ THE BOOK. Or at least the last two chapters, because most of the movie is similar to the novel, except for the end. Let's just say that something that seems inevitable as a result of physics at the end doesn't happen in the movie, but does in the book.
i think what people are afraid of is the fact that the napster client allows the world to relatively anonymously access a specific directory of your system. if there's any kind of security hole, it could be hacked to allow access to your _whole_ system (that's bad). it needs to be as secure as an ftp daemon.
i think the non-ratio format of napster doesn't encourage people to post false mp3 files. you mostly see this on mp3 ftp servers where you need to upload something before you can download. with napster, there's no benefit to this, aside from causing chaos.
Since the link on the /. story didn't have an http://, I had to type in the link manually and at first I type just "purdueonline.com", which leads to the homepage for Global Transit Logistics, Inc. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that (as far as a legal sense), but it seems odd from a practical sense. Do you know know why this is, ttyp0? Is it just a mix up on your hosting services end?
As the great Homer J. Simpson once said, "It's funny _because_ it's true," (italics mine).
> A new site perhaps? GPLStuff.com?
.com after it without realizing that someone else is going to beat you to the punch.
gasp! hurry up and register it! _never_ mention a catchy phrase with
yes, but most WORD users have no idea how to do this. just because you CAN change it doesn't change the fact microsoft is trying to sell people products that necessary only due to the clutter of their own products.
the ironic part of this device, and the test page for it, is the total and absolute useless clutter they show in the toolbar of MS WORD. how many functions does a damned word processor need and how many of them can readily recognized by a 8x8 pixel icon?! i don't understand 1/5 of the icons i see when i use MS WORD. this is the reason we have pull down menus. they're a good thing. you don't need some $200 mouse to simulate the same thing.
If she doesn't have the money to pay off a $70K debt, then she never would have been given a credit limit high enough to charge $70K on two cards.
well, never say never. i'm a college student with a $1500 credit limit. i don't even make that much money with my on campus job in 3 months. if i maxed out my credit card (which of course i wouldn't), my parents would have to bail me out. perhaps that's just what the credit card companies are thinking, but my parents are not cosingers on my card or anything like that.
this is my first credit card, as well.
as far as i know, they didn't do any background check on the information i put in. they didn't even ask for enough information to verify that i do work and make X amount of money or pay X amount of money for my housing, unless they have some inside connection with social security numbers.
it just seems to me that credit card companies are a bit too willing to raise limits and give out credit cards _sometimes_, because they know they can charge 20% interest or whatever and it's really better for them if the customers don't pay on time.
Credit card companies get a percentage of your purchase. If you charge $100 at a store with your Visa card, Visa get $4 and the store gets $96 (4% used to be the number, I don't know if this is still accurate).
yes, i had forgotten about that, but this number is quickly dwarfed by monthly interest of usually at least 1% for someone who only pays the minimum necessary payment.
i'd be willing to bet they make more money off of interest than off of those automatic charges, but of course i could be wrong. according to this link the average household has $7,000 in credit card debt and pay $1,000 in interest and fees. of course, this i don't know how reliable this source is as i just found it in a quick search, but it sounds about right to me.
it's just hard to feel sorry for a huge credit card company losing a mere 70k or an online casino losing out on 70k they charged for someone to click a few buttons.
i've never used online gambling, but exactly how did she get 70k into debt only using her credit card? i know that some relatively wealthy people have 70k limits and it's not that unheard of, but most people don't have nearly that much. my parents are pretty upper-middle class and they "only" have a 10k limit.
does the gambling company simply ask for your credit card number, let you do your gambling and then at the at the end of the month they charge you for your losses (or, less likely, give you credit for your winnings?). if she doesn't even have 70k worth of _credit_, it is partially the casino's fault for letting her get that far in debt without checking her card.
i've never used online gambling, so i don't know how it works. but if this monthly statement approach is how they do it, it's simply a bad idea. a much better idea would be to buy "chips" with the credit (though probably better with "real" money). of course, you can always get cash advances on credit cards, so only allowing "real" cash won't work completely (though it would stop the completely on-a-whim things).
even if she did have a 70k limit, she probably shouldn't've had one. i'm not saying it's not her fault, but this ruling is a stiff warning to the credit card companies and the casino companies to be more careful about who they give credit to. credit card companies live on people who can't afford the credit they give them. if everyone could, they would pay their monthly statements in full, never pay any interest, never give any money to the credit card companies. obviously, this is not so.
no, i'm not delighted about the ruling and i don't agree with it, but it's not necessarily all bad.
this is one of those things my wonderful senior year high school teacher used to talk about. we would talk about things like if all words are really "images" in the brain, like as if there's a mental stamp we have inside that we "think" of every time we say "run", that could really be translated into any language... very interesting, but it's really hard to out-think your own brain and try to figure out what it's doing.
there was an exchange student from germany in that class and she said that when she first came here, she would "think in german", but eventually she found it easier to "think in english" when she was going to speak english.
i'm a very poor spanish student (which have to take at college due to general requirements blahblahblah) and i'm not at the point where i can really "think in spanish", so i "think in english" and of course i speak about ten times slower than good spanish speakers (those people they put on the listening tapes are so damn fast!).
if there is some kind of "universal" language that your brain thinks in, it must be really hidden from your conscious self, because i find it very difficult to think without words. but, of course, as my teacher would say, if you can't think without words, how could the first languages have been developed?
so of course we must be _able_ to think without words. i guess we just make up our own internal mental representations for things or concepts, but once we learn language, this is probably not used.
as far as the project itself is concerned... this is going to be _necessary_ at some point for language translation (though of course i think everyone should speak english, like almost "everyone" does already). if you have just have italian-english and german-french, etc,etc. translation algorithms, it's going to get ridiculous. n^2, where n is the number of languages you want to translate between.
i really just hate languages.
well, i guess i just said win95's GUI is more stable in a mode of diplomacy toward the person i was replying to. i wasn't really specific in saying what it was more stable than, but i'd say that enlightment, at this point, does some pretty odd things sometimes that don't always make sense. meaning stability in terms of a user-interface predictability standpoint. as far as the win95 GUI itself crashing, it's really just hard to tell what is crashing in win95, because it's usually everything that goes down.
i feel much more comfortable using the win95 GUI than using enlightenment, but this may just be a lack of experience. but i like windowmaker better than both of them.
enlightenment is only _one_ of the many GUIs that are available for linux/x11. enlightenment's stated goal, as far as i can remember, is to be ultimately configurable and have every feature you could ever imagine. i've used it in the past and have found it too complex (and sometimes too slow) to bother with, but there's nothing wrong with one GUI being huge.
i use window maker, which is quite configurable (in a "feel" sense), though it's not as visually morphing as enlightenment is. if you want something that's lighter, i would suggest window maker wholeheartedly.
while i admit the win95 GUI is faster and more stable, there are many things wrong with it. it's not nearly as configurable as most x11 GUIs, in both of a visual and feel sense. it only has one "workspace" or "virtual window" or "layer" or whatever you want to call it. and of course since it's "integrated" into the OS, if it crases, so does your computer.
but the point is, if enlightment isn't for you, that doesn't mean anything against linux. that's the beauty of linux. just pick a different GUI! (or of course the standard line "write your own!").
i'm a sophmore computer science student at nyu (yeah, who ever knew good ole liberal new york university had a cs department?). i have an work-study job where i learn all about perl and javascript and such which is useful for your resume, but i still like my classes. i guess it seems like i'm learning more at work than at school, but i also kinda like the general liberal arts education.
as many others have said, in one way or another, college is about learning _how_ to learn. no computer science graduate is going to stop learning after he gradutes, you shouldn't either. if you're really that hot right now, maybe you shouldn't go to college at all for a degree and just take classes or learn on your own for specific languages. however, there's nothing wrong with learning indepth computer science theory and also how to write essays well. you don't want to be a hardcore hacker forever, do you?
a "normal" college is also a good place to get drunk a lot. if you like that sort of thing. i think i'm starting to like it too much.
cold fusion comes and goes, but c stays the same.
I'm posting using the QNX demo and their browser. I dialed into my ISP, all I needed was the telephone number and user/password. It asked for the DNS server, but I just put in something bogus knowing that I usually get it from my ISP automatically. So now I'm browsing slashdot and it looks all right. Not wonderful, but definitely usable.
If they could get the flicker down on the scrolling and add java support, this would be wonderful for webTV-like appliances. This is not to say that I actually think those appliances are any good, but, um, yeah. But I don't know exactly what market their aiming for.
I'm just quite impressed by the ease and functionality of this little demo. I don't know how the real OS looks, but I probably wouldn't be willing to pay for it, simply because it seems like Linux will be what applications get written for (aside from Windows) in the near future.
Yeah, it's basically a 30 minute diversion from homework, but I think it was well worth it.
i got a question in which was basically asking him how red hat plans to keep users up to date with all of the constant new versions, but specifically for modem users. of course, they took out the part about modems when they asked my question and he just said "they can connect to our ftp site for free or pay a subscriber free and get priority high bandwidth access!" which defeated the point of my question. oh well.
anyone else misread the dept at first and thought it said "the _hated_ wonder"? heh.
the article mentions that freebsd is linux's "rival" and that some linux users would be angered that apple chose freebsd instead of linux. i don't think a reasonable linux zealot would really think that. i would much rather see any type of unix-like, open source OS than the dreadful regular macOS, in which the GUI is so painstakingly integrated into the OS that it drives me absolutely nuts. even moreso than windows95.
freebsd is a rival of linux, perhaps, but it's a friendly rivalry or at least it should be.
also, it was interesting to see good ol' rob referenced in the article. he's becoming quite the open-source geek celebrity.
nowhere does it say that they're "tied" to a specific environment. and what do you mean by "for creativity a mac can't be beat"? i'm not an expert on macs by any degree, but what software is there on macintosh that doesn't exist or there isn't a very similar replacement for on windows or something else (and the sunray can run windows apps)?
the fact of the matter is that there's absolutely no reason to have full-fledged computers on every desktop in schools. especially with windows and macs, it's much too easy for rebellious teens to mess with the systems and it causes a complete administration headache. with windows,you have to buy third-party software to have any kind of multi-user security. it's probably the same with macs (though i do not know for sure). in high school, i was very often the person who was called upon to fix windows computers that people messed up by mistake or on purpose. it's a very annoying, consuming task.
plus, it's extremely expensive to upgrade every three years, etc, etc. from what i've heard about it,the sun ray sounds like the perfect solution.
it is important for children to have access to computers in school, but it doesn't have to be a technology training atmosphere with the perfect mix of different computers. i doubt that most casuals users of computers couldn't tell the difference between KDE and windows.
i really have yet to read a single comment that convinces me this is a bad idea.
the real question is should you feel entitled to a special title just because you spent more time in school or did something that impressed some university? when i left my high school, the principal and all of the vice principals were "doctors". it's actually getting quite common these days, relatively. i think our good ol' modest linux figurehead would prefer simply "linus".
however, some good linux propaganda would be:
Bill Gates: College dropout.
Linus Torvalds: Doctor.
Who do you want behind your system?
of course this is pressuming bill gates never got an honorary doctorate and he probably has. damn it.
I live in Pennsylvania and there are so many damned specialized license plates that it's really starting to get annoying. For example, if you donate money to some "save the animals!" thing, you get a license plate with an owl on it. There are several variations of that theme. Then there's another one for D.A.R.E., one for every public university, and various military ones (I suppose I shouldn't whine too much about those). And there are probably others I don't know about.
The link from the Wired story that has the actual picture of the plate says that that "Virginia offers more than 150 specialized plates...". 150!?!? That's ridiculous! Isn't the primary point of license plates to identify the car for legal purposes? How is a Virginia cop supposed to recognize 150 different license plates so he knows that one or another isn't a fake? What do you say when you see a hit-and-run or something?
cop: Did you see the license plate?
you: Yeah. It was 32DFJ-23.
cop: What state?
you: Uh, I dunno. It had a picture of a rabbit, I think. Or maybe it was a Klansman. All I know is that he had a carrot or a flaming cross.
cop: uh-huh.
Now I'm not really suggesting that these types of plates are going to enable people to remain anonymous from crimes (no security through obscurity!), but I'm just "nostalgic" (imagine that at 19 years old) for the days when Virginia's license plate was Virginia's license plate and they all looked the same. Do you have to pay to get a special "internet" license plate (probably)? It sounds like a stupid scheme to get more money from the super-consumers that the internet has contributed to. If you really need to express your personality to people behind you in traffic, just get a bumper sticker. It just seems really lame to try to pigeonhole your personality through some government-created license plate.
While perhaps making property taxes the basis for public education keeps the Feds out of local authority, property taxes has proven to be a _horrible_ way to fund education. People in lower-income areas, like cities, get poorly-paid teachers (read: bad teachers (no, of course not all of them)), unmaintained buildings, and as a result, poor people often stay poor and rich people often stay rich.
I was "lucky" enough to grow up in a relatively wealthy area of suburban Philadelphia and got a relatively good education. But even moving from one school district to another school district in the same county showed a serious discrepency between the financial capabilities between schools. My old school district was not horrible, but it had less advanced classes, no computers with Internet connectivity, and the year I left, they offered early retirement to a load of older teachers to hire new ones at about half the price.
My new school district, however, supported by a multitude of people moving into newly-built $250,000+ homes, was building new schools at an almost alarming rate, had ethernet connections in every room, and it was considered almost odd if you didn't take at least one or two AP classes (most of the upper-percentage students graduated with at least 16 college credits). I took AP computer science there in my senior year. The highest programming offered at my old school was, uh, programming in BASIC.
This is all, of course, unscientific evidence, but the simple fact is that rich areas get more money per student for education than poor areas do under the current system. It's just a bad idea.
have you visited yahoo recently? i tend to think that a lot of their revenue is starting to come from tie-in deals with web commerce companies. it seems like everytime you search for something that could be bought, you get a link for how to buy it through a yahoo-affiliated website. you click through, buy it, and yahoo gets a cut (at least in theory). this is not horribly evil or anything, but it's not something that slashdot.org could do as easily without losing its focus and annoying a lot of people. i doubt much of slashdot's revenue comes from its "affiliation" with amazon.com.