I heard cannabis brownies were the way to go. Those are "hash brownies" as in brownies that use the oils rendered from cannabis (hash). They aren't actually hash, and thus the first pun was the better executed.
Sorry, but if you're going to pun poorly, prepare to be critiqued.
$400 for 16 gigabytes of storage is simply not good enough for a lot of people with large music libraries who like to have 30-40 albums to listen to on command. Right now, I get by on my 30GB iPod, and if I had half the space I'd just delete a lot of the junk I never listen to and some of the video podcasts that are kind of large, and I really don't ever watch unless I'm connected to my TV.
Average file size for a decent bitrate of song is around 3-5MB, right? So, you're talking about roughly 4000 songs. Now granted, that's not the whole library of someone who has ripped an extensive collection of CDs, but it's quite enough to carry around.
I'm also very happy with the storage size due to the fact that it's 16GB of solid-state memory, so there's never a problem with bouncing it around.
Most of the eye candy doesn't eat too much CPU, and it all easily be enabled and disabled from it's control panel (compiz-fusion uses ccsm which works great, beryl-settings-manager was also pretty good). I was also impressed by beryl-manager (now fusion-icon) which made switching windows and decoration managers easier than ever. Gutsy doesn't expose the control panel by default. Their default mechanism simply provides a radio dialog with three options: no effets (this turns off compiz), some effects (this enables compiz, but with most features turned off) and lots of effects (this turns on most of the effects that aren't outright disruptive to users who aren't expecting them).
I would have preferred something between that and the settings manager. I'm also not pleased with being unable to find the window decoration controls (I think they've assumed you'll just use the overall Gnome theme management for that, but you can't select any advanced compiz decoration controls through that, which include nice things like translucent title bars).
well they are admitting that they are developing it now, which means it's 5 years old and the terr's have an effective work-arround and that the Air Force actually needs some of those $450.00 TOILET SEATS FOR REAL. Those weren't Air Force, they were Navy toilet seats, and they cost that much because they had to be specially designed for the battleship they were going into so that, under hurricane conditions, they would not throw feces around the room. It's a different world from re-modeling your bathroom.
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
So when they get it wrong, and the police storm my front door instead of my neighbors, will it still be "cool"? 5% error rate is too high to base any first-order data on. My assumption would be that they'll use this information to determine what online content to spend their time working on. For example, if the modern equivalent of Echelon tells us that a terrorist in Iraq makes frequent calls to someone who makes frequent, high-signal calls to someone in the U.S. and that person is identified as the potential author of several anonymous postings to various forums, then you spend a whole lot of time analyzing those postings to determine what information they might be passing on.
It's actually pretty obvious, and the only thing that surprises me is that it's being developed now. My only guess that makes sense, here, is that this is a replacement for older tech they're already using.
Actually, given the $120 million dollars WoW is pulling in each month, and the number of competitors out there trying to create the next great game... This is, I think, Blizzard's greatest challenge. They need to continue to innovate incrementally (the way the game did when it was introduced) without holding back because they have a lot of money to lose now. They absolutely will lose the market if they treat WoW like a cash cow and milk it until everyone leaves. Well, not everyone will leave. EverQuest is still out there, and I'm sure WoW will be for many years after it ceases to be popular.
But I really think that WoW could exist as a popular MMO functionally forever, should the decide to continue to push hard at the limits of their creativity.
The next expansion will be very telling. I'm not seeing anything yet that indicates that they've put as much thought or creativity into it as the first expansion. The first expansion introduced several new modes of play including arenas, heroic dungeons, and a real parity between the depth of content for raiders and that for more casual players. If they were to keep that process up, and continue to breath new life into the game with expansions rather than just milk another round of retail sales, I don't see any reason why new gamers would choose something other than WoW as their primary MMO. Just the fact that it has a strong, established player base makes it very attractive.
Hi my name is Bob and I'm a WoW addict. I used to be 3rd in my guild as a level 60 night elf mage. I played so much that I grew these b*tch t*ts... When I saw, "Hi my name is Bob," I immediately thought of posting a "Bob has bitch-tits" reply. I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers that line.
That it captured the imagination of anyone. It has certainly attracted the interest of bunch of players, but the game is not imagination-grabbing by any stretch of the... oh you know. I think it's safe to say that it's captured the imaginations of players in the sense that it has become one of the most popular Tolkienesque settings in the world. I'm sure that a hefty fraction of the player base were exposed to either WoW or the LoTR movies as their first dose of high fantasy. Now, no one's going to say that the entire game is innovative. It's very much like EverQuest. It's very much like Warcraft. Warcraft was very much like all of the rest of the genre. There's certainly some originality (as a game and as a story), but originality and imagination-capturing aren't always the same thing, especially when something is so popular that it's the first exposure to a genre for so many.
I understand that it's appealing, in a "rubbernecking the auto accident" way, to frame the discussion as a flame war between Stallman and Torvalds, but such an approach does nothing to further either man's position. Actually, it's not an argument. An argument requires two participants. Torvalds has outlined his reasons for approaching licensing the way he plans to. He's outlined concerns that he has with respect to the changes that he either would or would not make to his software. These are all practical matters, and don't actually have much to do with Stallman, other than insofar as he's the one who's pushing a new license. Stallman, on the other hand, is actively trying to argue that OTHERS should not listen to Torvalds. That OTHERS are being lead astray by his lack of faith in Free Software and his "confusing" use of the term Open Source (a term coined specifically to address one of the deepest shortcomings in the Free Software movement: the ambiguous use of the word "free").
Stallman is arguing a point. Torvalds really hasn't.
Stallman is a political creature, and freedom, as he defines it, is obviously important to him. Stallman is a smart guy and a brilliant programmer. He's also only questionably sane enough to interact with the rest of the world. It probably took someone like that to so single-mindedly push what might have been inevitable (the commodity status of freely distributed software, a phenomenon that pre-dates Stallman's work, but which he certainly moved along substantially). I worry about so many people treating him as some kind of political leader, however.
Torvalds is a practical creature, apparently uninterested in the political nature of Stallman's model, and develops accordingly. Fortunately for many of us there is an overlap that allows us to run GNU software on a Linux kernel and reap the benefits of both worlds.
"Freedom" in Stallman's world is neither easy or convenient. Committing to his approach means rejecting some software that may be useful or interesting or fun. "Freedom" in Torvalds' world is, as noted in the article, is simply a means to an end; the end being collaborative development of useful software. For now, neither could exist without the other, which makes most of the flaming I anticipate in this discussion somewhat ironic.
I'm also not going to argue that the compiler front-end isn't complex and difficult to replace -- of course it is. I don't personally think there's much value in a re-implementation. That said, I do believe that LLVM provides a potential migration path away from the GPL, if corporations with sufficient resources deemed such a migration to be worthwhile. Fair and reasonable. Thanks for the considered reply.
Users care only a very little bit about the license. They want working software. Developers do care only a little bit since they cannot randomly mix & match code uder different licenses. GPL by definition gives them the most choice of source. I'm not sure I agree. The GPL has only one real benefit, and that's the fact that companies that want to modify the software must become part of the community, and not just leeches. The primary benefit of THAT is that these companies often find themselves becoming more a part of the community than they had intended.
I find this to be a benefit. Those who don't tend to either not care, or use BSD or proprietary software. That's cool too.
It's kind of amusing to look at the history of FOSS, and a recurring theme has been that developers think that just because they have developed a complex piece of software over a long period of time (gcc comes to mind) that it's not open to being reimplimented in the future. If GPL3 becomes a thorn in would-be commercial users, there will be money available to replace it with something that's not so obnoxious.
This is occurring
No, it's really not.
see LLVM and LLVM-GCC. Several corporations are contributing to LLVM -- including Apple First a point: I'm a huge fan of LLVM and everything that it stands for. I think it's a wonderful project, and the goal of having high-performance, portable bytecode is excellent.
Now an out: If you just misunderstood the topic, and were only talking about forking, and not re-implementation, then this reply is somewhat moot.
That said, they've kind of made the point that you don't run out and re-implement GCC. Fork it? Perhaps, but that gets unwieldy fast unless you chop off support for several of its front-end languages and deny any future development of the sort.
GCC was written because compilers at the time were either fairly primitive or highly proprietary (trade secrets in many cases). GCC today would be monstrous to re-implement, and the benefit of doing so would be essentially nil.
Now, LLVM may never sync back up with GCC's mainline, or they may. Who knows. That's a fair line to draw in the sand, but the BSD folks have talked about re-implementing GCC for years now, and have always come to the same conclusion. They could stand on their high horse and say that all licenses should give businesses the right to refuse to share their changes or they can move forward with their excellent operating system. They chose the latter, proving that they're developers, not politicians.
I certainly would love to see GCC fork, and fork cleanly into (at least) two well supported versions. How about a fork that doesn't try to be a compiler for every frickin' language under the sun, under a BSD license - wouldn't that be spiffy? It would make no difference.
GCC's language front-ends are just that. Front-ends. Their development affects the back-end only insofar as it must be improved to resolve limitations and problems discovered by the front-ends. Deleting the various front-ends would not change the back-end or the C or C++ front-ends (assuming those are the languages that you consider core) at all.
If you feel that support of multiple languages somehow hurts GCC, then I welcome you to fork it and see how it works out.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Someone explain to me where the wrong is....
The more I think about this, the more it smells like some sort of ill-conceived right-to-profit argument that would come out of the RIAA, MPAA or a telco. That is, "we currently make money, so any change to the landscape that would threaten that is ( immoral | illegal | etc. )"
I have ads on my site. I welcome visitors to said site. If I wanted it to be a pay-only site, I would require a login that cost money to get. If CNN wants to do that, they certainly can. They don't want that, though. They want you do view their content, but ONLY ON THEIR TERMS. The correct answer is: this is the market. Cope or die.
Yeah, I always find this debate pointless on its face. BSD uses huge amounts of GPL-licensed software, so there's no substantial difference. In fact, BSD will be using GPLv3-licensed software, unless they intend on taking over their own fork of GCC (a monumental task which would substantially harm their ability to support BSD itself).
I also suspect that you'll see a fair amount of Gnome and KDE packages (though I don't know about the core of those two projects, and how they'll proceed) use the GPLv3.
Linux and BSD OSes will continue to use much of each other's code, and things like the file utilities will become less and less important. Eventually, I expect that you'll find Linux and BSD essentially differing on nothing more than how their distributions are structured and their kernels. The idea that their different licenses have a substantial impact on the end-user OS is rather myopic at best.
All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.
I have read significant parts of the MS-OOXML spec and I can assure you that this it would be a horrible mistake to accept this beast as an international standard. The biggest issue are not the (existing, but comparatively minor) technical shortcomings, but the fact that Microsoft's semi-proprietary OOXML standardization strategy is a head-on attack on the existing, technically better, genuinely open standards.
That sounds circular. You suggest that the technical shortcomings are minor, but that the competing standards are technically better. Are the differences minor as well, or were you simply stating two, unrelated facts? In what way are what competing standards superior, and how minor (or major) are these differences?
This story was obviously submitted so that you would see something like an "501 of 896" posting count. It is 100% pure flamebait or perhaps on a higher level a poorly written satire.
I am not in the middle of this Liberal/Conservative "war," and I can tell you honestly that liberals can be very stupid, and conservatives can be very astute. I think that's the wrong way to draw conclusions from this study (the implied conclusions to which you're posing your counter-argument).
I think the correct conclusion would be that a strikingly even line is drawn through our population. One half freely (to an extent) accepts new information when it's presented. The other half is resistant to new information, and favors information that is older and more established.
I'd suggest that this is an evolutionary imperative. You need the free-thinkers who are going to provide your edge against the environment and potential rival species / groups. You also need the stability of consistent choices when change turns out to be temporary. For example, if a new source of food appears which has more nutritional benefit, you want to be able to adapt to that, but you want to also resist constantly selecting new foods, as this retards the development of specialized farming / gathering capabilities.
The use of the word "accurate" in the summary is highly questionable, however. I'll have to read the full article when I have time to understand what they mean by that.
> He's been praising Microsoft for years, every chance he gets.
Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it.... Taking any code from that camp is just inviting a lawsuit. Sooner or later, BOOM! All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard. It's probably been in the works for quite some time before we ever heard about it, and Microsoft does employ some of the brightest minds in software. The problem is that Microsoft's grubby hands at the wheel of a standard for file format will mean that their "reference implementation" (Office) will embody a set of defacto addenda to the standard, and no one will be able to produce a truly compatible implementation.
I'm not entirely clear on why this is more interesting than just using timing like most of the rest of the world does. Perl has, for example, long used a setjmp/longjmp-based timing test for its Math::TrulyRandom package by Matt Blaze and Don Mitchell of AT&T and of course most modern Unix-like systems implement/dev/random and/dev/urandom again based on timing. RFC1750 has given useful directions on how to generate random numbers on generic hardware for well over a decade. I recall first reading this RFC, not long after it came out. It really changed my understanding of random numbers on computer hardware.
This just doesn't seem all that newsworthy, though it's cool enough as yet another random number generation technique, I suppose.
No, the FTA states that selling adwords to COMPETITORS is deceptive. If you read past the first sentence you'll note that a competitor bought adwords including trademarks of a rival and have it link to them instead.
The complaint isn't stating that adwords or sponsored links is deceptive. It's talking about how in this instance it's being abused. I'm not terribly shocked that the Slashdot summary is poorly worded to convey the contents of the source article.
Sad that so many bad articles continue to make it through, even with the Firehose.
Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results -- those ranked by relevance
Google search results are ranked by popularity, not relevance. This is incorrect.
Google's results take popularity into account, but they also look for your key words in the body of the page, assess where they are in absolute terms, and relative to each other, and also perform some nebulous other analysis on relevance (e.g. articles with your terms in the title are ranked somewhat higher, though title-spamming has limited the usefulness of that).
You could just RTFA before posting a comment and then not look quite as foolish.
"The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results - those ranked by relevance - from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page." That quote was in the summary too. I think the GP is just confused, and seeking confirmation that the suit is really that baseless. They're essentially claiming that having sponsored ads at the top of a search results page (that are marked as such) is somehow misleading.
Why the heck is it that EVERY day, Slashdot publishes something negative about Google that's totally insane?!
I'm a LONG time Slashdot reader, and I have to say that I've begun to question WHY that is.
Of course, on real systems you use a decent hashing algorithm that can handle a much larger space.
If you're interested in generating random, but secure passwords, I recommend my mkpasswd program, which can securely generate random passwords, or generate very insecure passwords, and the entire spectrum in-between. It uses a regular-expression-like syntax for describing a possible password, and then generates random passwords that fit the pattern. For example, you can tell it that you want 10 completely random characters, or you can tell it that you want a nine-letter pseudo-word (something that's pronounceable as if it were English, but is not a valid word) followed by a random character. Obviously the second example is much less random than the first, and thus less secure against attacks. There are many, many knobs, as well as a large number of default patterns that can be randomly selected from if you're lazy (at the cost of some security, of course).
This will take you to the list of the most recently created articles. If you find that you have trouble keeping up with other editors who are reviewing the same articles, you might find this link useful:
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but if you're going to pun poorly, prepare to be critiqued.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash which disambiguates the various uses.
Average file size for a decent bitrate of song is around 3-5MB, right? So, you're talking about roughly 4000 songs. Now granted, that's not the whole library of someone who has ripped an extensive collection of CDs, but it's quite enough to carry around.
I'm also very happy with the storage size due to the fact that it's 16GB of solid-state memory, so there's never a problem with bouncing it around.
I would have preferred something between that and the settings manager. I'm also not pleased with being unable to find the window decoration controls (I think they've assumed you'll just use the overall Gnome theme management for that, but you can't select any advanced compiz decoration controls through that, which include nice things like translucent title bars).
So when they get it wrong, and the police storm my front door instead of my neighbors, will it still be "cool"? 5% error rate is too high to base any first-order data on. My assumption would be that they'll use this information to determine what online content to spend their time working on. For example, if the modern equivalent of Echelon tells us that a terrorist in Iraq makes frequent calls to someone who makes frequent, high-signal calls to someone in the U.S. and that person is identified as the potential author of several anonymous postings to various forums, then you spend a whole lot of time analyzing those postings to determine what information they might be passing on.
It's actually pretty obvious, and the only thing that surprises me is that it's being developed now. My only guess that makes sense, here, is that this is a replacement for older tech they're already using.
But I really think that WoW could exist as a popular MMO functionally forever, should the decide to continue to push hard at the limits of their creativity.
The next expansion will be very telling. I'm not seeing anything yet that indicates that they've put as much thought or creativity into it as the first expansion. The first expansion introduced several new modes of play including arenas, heroic dungeons, and a real parity between the depth of content for raiders and that for more casual players. If they were to keep that process up, and continue to breath new life into the game with expansions rather than just milk another round of retail sales, I don't see any reason why new gamers would choose something other than WoW as their primary MMO. Just the fact that it has a strong, established player base makes it very attractive.
Oh, and what the **** is with the penguin!?
Stallman is arguing a point. Torvalds really hasn't. Stallman is a political creature, and freedom, as he defines it, is obviously important to him. Stallman is a smart guy and a brilliant programmer. He's also only questionably sane enough to interact with the rest of the world. It probably took someone like that to so single-mindedly push what might have been inevitable (the commodity status of freely distributed software, a phenomenon that pre-dates Stallman's work, but which he certainly moved along substantially). I worry about so many people treating him as some kind of political leader, however.
Torvalds is a practical creature, apparently uninterested in the political nature of Stallman's model, and develops accordingly. Fortunately for many of us there is an overlap that allows us to run GNU software on a Linux kernel and reap the benefits of both worlds.
"Freedom" in Stallman's world is neither easy or convenient. Committing to his approach means rejecting some software that may be useful or interesting or fun. "Freedom" in Torvalds' world is, as noted in the article, is simply a means to an end; the end being collaborative development of useful software. For now, neither could exist without the other, which makes most of the flaming I anticipate in this discussion somewhat ironic.
I find this to be a benefit. Those who don't tend to either not care, or use BSD or proprietary software. That's cool too.
This is occurring
No, it's really not. see LLVM and LLVM-GCC. Several corporations are contributing to LLVM -- including Apple First a point: I'm a huge fan of LLVM and everything that it stands for. I think it's a wonderful project, and the goal of having high-performance, portable bytecode is excellent.Now an out: If you just misunderstood the topic, and were only talking about forking, and not re-implementation, then this reply is somewhat moot.
That said, they've kind of made the point that you don't run out and re-implement GCC. Fork it? Perhaps, but that gets unwieldy fast unless you chop off support for several of its front-end languages and deny any future development of the sort.
GCC was written because compilers at the time were either fairly primitive or highly proprietary (trade secrets in many cases). GCC today would be monstrous to re-implement, and the benefit of doing so would be essentially nil.
Now, LLVM may never sync back up with GCC's mainline, or they may. Who knows. That's a fair line to draw in the sand, but the BSD folks have talked about re-implementing GCC for years now, and have always come to the same conclusion. They could stand on their high horse and say that all licenses should give businesses the right to refuse to share their changes or they can move forward with their excellent operating system. They chose the latter, proving that they're developers, not politicians.
GCC's language front-ends are just that. Front-ends. Their development affects the back-end only insofar as it must be improved to resolve limitations and problems discovered by the front-ends. Deleting the various front-ends would not change the back-end or the C or C++ front-ends (assuming those are the languages that you consider core) at all.
If you feel that support of multiple languages somehow hurts GCC, then I welcome you to fork it and see how it works out.
The more I think about this, the more it smells like some sort of ill-conceived right-to-profit argument that would come out of the RIAA, MPAA or a telco. That is, "we currently make money, so any change to the landscape that would threaten that is ( immoral | illegal | etc. )"
I have ads on my site. I welcome visitors to said site. If I wanted it to be a pay-only site, I would require a login that cost money to get. If CNN wants to do that, they certainly can. They don't want that, though. They want you do view their content, but ONLY ON THEIR TERMS. The correct answer is: this is the market. Cope or die.
Yeah, I always find this debate pointless on its face. BSD uses huge amounts of GPL-licensed software, so there's no substantial difference. In fact, BSD will be using GPLv3-licensed software, unless they intend on taking over their own fork of GCC (a monumental task which would substantially harm their ability to support BSD itself).
I also suspect that you'll see a fair amount of Gnome and KDE packages (though I don't know about the core of those two projects, and how they'll proceed) use the GPLv3.
Linux and BSD OSes will continue to use much of each other's code, and things like the file utilities will become less and less important. Eventually, I expect that you'll find Linux and BSD essentially differing on nothing more than how their distributions are structured and their kernels. The idea that their different licenses have a substantial impact on the end-user OS is rather myopic at best.
That sounds circular. You suggest that the technical shortcomings are minor, but that the competing standards are technically better. Are the differences minor as well, or were you simply stating two, unrelated facts? In what way are what competing standards superior, and how minor (or major) are these differences?I have read significant parts of the MS-OOXML spec and I can assure you that this it would be a horrible mistake to accept this beast as an international standard. The biggest issue are not the (existing, but comparatively minor) technical shortcomings, but the fact that Microsoft's semi-proprietary OOXML standardization strategy is a head-on attack on the existing, technically better, genuinely open standards.
I am not in the middle of this Liberal/Conservative "war," and I can tell you honestly that liberals can be very stupid, and conservatives can be very astute. I think that's the wrong way to draw conclusions from this study (the implied conclusions to which you're posing your counter-argument).
I think the correct conclusion would be that a strikingly even line is drawn through our population. One half freely (to an extent) accepts new information when it's presented. The other half is resistant to new information, and favors information that is older and more established.
I'd suggest that this is an evolutionary imperative. You need the free-thinkers who are going to provide your edge against the environment and potential rival species / groups. You also need the stability of consistent choices when change turns out to be temporary. For example, if a new source of food appears which has more nutritional benefit, you want to be able to adapt to that, but you want to also resist constantly selecting new foods, as this retards the development of specialized farming / gathering capabilities.
The use of the word "accurate" in the summary is highly questionable, however. I'll have to read the full article when I have time to understand what they mean by that.
Not only that, he has yet to encounter a Microsoft technology he didn't like so much he wanted to clone it into the Free Software world and make us all dependent on it.
That leaves us not far from where we are today.
I'm not entirely clear on why this is more interesting than just using timing like most of the rest of the world does. Perl has, for example, long used a setjmp/longjmp-based timing test for its Math::TrulyRandom package by Matt Blaze and Don Mitchell of AT&T and of course most modern Unix-like systems implement /dev/random and /dev/urandom again based on timing. RFC1750 has given useful directions on how to generate random numbers on generic hardware for well over a decade. I recall first reading this RFC, not long after it came out. It really changed my understanding of random numbers on computer hardware.
This just doesn't seem all that newsworthy, though it's cool enough as yet another random number generation technique, I suppose.
The complaint isn't stating that adwords or sponsored links is deceptive. It's talking about how in this instance it's being abused. I'm not terribly shocked that the Slashdot summary is poorly worded to convey the contents of the source article.
Sad that so many bad articles continue to make it through, even with the Firehose.
Google search results are ranked by popularity, not relevance. This is incorrect.
Google's results take popularity into account, but they also look for your key words in the body of the page, assess where they are in absolute terms, and relative to each other, and also perform some nebulous other analysis on relevance (e.g. articles with your terms in the title are ranked somewhat higher, though title-spamming has limited the usefulness of that).
"The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results - those ranked by relevance - from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page." That quote was in the summary too. I think the GP is just confused, and seeking confirmation that the suit is really that baseless. They're essentially claiming that having sponsored ads at the top of a search results page (that are marked as such) is somehow misleading.
Why the heck is it that EVERY day, Slashdot publishes something negative about Google that's totally insane?!
I'm a LONG time Slashdot reader, and I have to say that I've begun to question WHY that is.
Of course, on real systems you use a decent hashing algorithm that can handle a much larger space.
If you're interested in generating random, but secure passwords, I recommend my mkpasswd program, which can securely generate random passwords, or generate very insecure passwords, and the entire spectrum in-between. It uses a regular-expression-like syntax for describing a possible password, and then generates random passwords that fit the pattern. For example, you can tell it that you want 10 completely random characters, or you can tell it that you want a nine-letter pseudo-word (something that's pronounceable as if it were English, but is not a valid word) followed by a random character. Obviously the second example is much less random than the first, and thus less secure against attacks. There are many, many knobs, as well as a large number of default patterns that can be randomly selected from if you're lazy (at the cost of some security, of course).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages
This will take you to the list of the most recently created articles. If you find that you have trouble keeping up with other editors who are reviewing the same articles, you might find this link useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Newpages&limit=250&offset=250&namespace=0
Which will take you to the same list, but starting from the 250th most recent article.
Typically, it's most useful to
Anyone can do these things, and you can also just improve on any article by adding additional sources, or expanding on the article.