Besides, Acts of God can also sometimes be covered under insurance - after all, what's the point of wasting all that damn money on insurance if they can just turn on you and say, "Nope, that tree falling on your house last night during the freak ice storm was an Act of God" ?
Well, I had a sad experience with a certain web hosting company that had advertised "a guaranteed 99% uptime". The actual agreement excluded things like "acts of God" and of course they blamed each and every outage on God. That DoS attack? Oh, that's simply an act of God, we can't do anything about it, no you can't get your money back. I didn't bother suing them or anything like that but simply switched providers but I wonder if there's some law that actually determines the jurisdiction of God in such matters;-)
The main impression that I get from the Wired list is "WTF, did they test their vehicles at all??" Because 4 vehicles out of 13 didn't even get out of the start area! I develop software for living, and while it is admittedly for easier tasks than autonomous desert-crossing, we test our product in hundreds and thousands of different situations and throw all kinds of shit at it to make sure it doesn't just die in some weird deployment scenario. I am really curious how much effort these teams spent on just testing their gear in different situations (not development).
A anti-geek as it may sound, I really can't see a need for 100% wireless coverage of any country large or small.
I really don't want to sit there and hear some guys talking about how they can watch their stock prices change second by second now, or some brat fragging a buddy whilst enjoying nature.
How is this different from having 100% cell phone service coverage? You could similarly say that it would be bothersome to have people talking on their cell phones everywhere and all the time. This has actually nothing to do with coverage and everything to do with people's culture. Estonia has had 100% cell coverage for a while now but I must say I find Estonian cell phone users less obtrusive than say, Americans (I live in the US most of the time but visit Estonia every now and then). America is about 5 years behind Estonia and other frontrunners in Europe when it comes to embracing cell phones and going through the same problems Europe did (people using their phones as status symbols and showing off and being a pain in the ass). However, people have really embraced the cell phone culture and gotten over the initial growth pain, there's much more respect to other people, less showing off and more maturity in general. I expect America to catch up in a few years in that respect.
Similarly, wireless Internet will evolve through the same stages, there will be a period of adolescence and then maturity. In 10 years, wireless coverage will be everywhere and we will wonder how we ever got by without it (similar to regular Internet or cell phones today).
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before. The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. "This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled. Well, he paid and then the plumber said to him: "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply tell them that you completed only the seventh grade. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly. One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check student's knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person who was ask was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he forgot the formula. He started to reason it and soon filled the board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result that he had forgotten. As a result he got "negative pi times r squared." He didn't like the negative, so he started all over again. He got the negative sign again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a negative. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
If your file system supported true symbolic links, your problem could be largely mitigated by using them.
So, let's say I want to have a view of all the images (and nothing but) that are: 1) taken by my friend 2) AND have EITHER me OR my wife on them 3) AND taken in New York City OR Boston 4) AND my wife has rated them with at least four stars out of five.
With WinFS + Longhorn shell I can actually easily create a view that has exactly these images. How would I do it with symlinks again?
ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory.
No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.
So you're seriously suggesting that Microsoft is creating a new file system just for wedding photos and nothing else? And you say that I should have a separate application for finding images, another one for finding music files, another one for documents, another one C programs and so on? Well thank you very much, I'd rather have a file system that lets me find all these in a uniform way, without having to install and learn a new app.
Manualy adding metadata to each of your 200+ wedding pictures looks so smarter than just creating an old fashioned directory "wedding pics" and moving them into it...
Actually, Longhorn shell (based on demos that I've seen) makes adding metadata to 200 pictures as easy as creating a folder and then moving your pics into them. You can create a "stack" of pictures called "wedding pics" and move necessary stuff into it. After that you can create another stack which has "pictures with me on it" which is completely orthogonal to the previous stack and move another set of pictures to the other stack. It is really quite similar to moving your files into directories except that: 1) they can belong to many different stacks at the same time 2) you can create views that contain arbitrary unions or intersections of the stacks (like "wedding pictures with me on it")
I can't wait to start using this wonderful FS
I guess that you were making a joke but I am seriously waiting for this to come out. I have currently several thousand digital pictures of various trips and events and finding a flexible, yet convenient organizing scheme for them is really hard, and WinFS would really help me out.
That's why you can change filenames and organize things into directories
This is completely missing the point. First, directory name can hold just one piece of metadata. Filename can hold one more. So, sure, you can create a directory named "wedding photos" but what if I want to find all pictures where I am on? All pictures taken in New York City (regardless of the particular event)? All pictures of children? All pictures that my wife likes? You can't really solve these with directories, and that's why WinFS is necessary.
Die miserable painful death from bovine spongiform encephalopathy... or have my privacy invaded.
Or, die a miserable painful death caused by a terrorist act... or have your privacy invaded. At least following the government logic. Both of these events have ridiculously low probabilities (mad cow being somewhat lower in my opinion) but somehow one is OK and the other isn't? Although I guess that most people think both are OK. It always amazes me how easily people lose any common sense when whipped up by sensationalism and fearmongering (compare with the ridiculous hassles that people have to put up with because of terrorism fears). Have some perspective, for God's sake. Thousands of people die in traffic accidents all the time but no one thinks it's OK for traffic cops to search me every time when I drive (compare to airports) or come to my home to lecture me about traffic dangers (compare to this article).
Is this new player going to annoy me with constant reminders to update (which I've been ignoring so far since every update is even worse and more bloated, and the update process takes over my file associations)?
The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
I hate spam as much as anybody but what you're saying is absurd. The US national debt is about 65-70% of US GDP. So you're saying that without spammers our GDP would be 65-70% higher? Ridiculous.
Well, Denmark is the oldest monerchy in the world, other than that you're probably right.
Actually, the Japanese monarchy dates back to 660 BC, making it by far the oldest in the world. Denmark's is more than thousand years younger, the starting date is not established precisely. Check this page for more information on the different current and former monarchies of the world.
Something tells me that airlines and security people won't like the idea of people carrying 4 ounce cartridges of flammable pure methyl alcohol onboard flights.
As opposed to bringing any flammable liquid onboard in a soda bottle? People should already realize that the "extra security" in airports an other public places is an absurd waste of travelers' and taxpayers' time and money. It is possible to kill another person with a simple towel after a few weeks training. Glass from picture frames or many other everyday items can be very deadly. The only way to keep people safe from each other is to handcuff them to their seats, so let's bring an end to this nonsense already.
The funny thing is, I don't actually remember the character sequence. Maybe it's because I play the piano, but I remember the hand motions of typing the password. So to pick a password I just generate a few random ones until I find one that "feels" okay.
I do the same thing. However, it has sometimes been a bitch to reconstruct the real password when I've been traveling abroad and had to use a non-US keyboard which has a different layout, especially since I tend to mix some punctuation characters into the password;)
Microsoft, Lotus, Sun, and Novell seem to have settled on SIP. Intel, H-P, Hitachi, Sony, and more or less the entire open source world is going toward XMPP, sometimes better known as Jabber.
and the poster says:
Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP.
Yeah, it's fun to paint the world in black and white but this is just a blatant lie.
So far as I'm concerned (the illegality of his actions aside) he performed a public service.
Well, I for one am quite mad at the guy, here's why: The problem for me is not terrorists, the chances of getting killed by a terrorist are ridiculously low. The problem is the screening process. It is absolutely impossible to make passengers safe from each other on a commercial airplane. A piece of broken glass (from a picture frame) wrapped halfway in cloth is a very effective weapon. It is possible to make deadly weapons out of virtually anything, even towels or newspapers. The whole screening process is idiotic and doesn't do anything but waste my time and money, making air travel an experience that I try to avoid if at all possible. Now there are two ways to "fix" the problem: 1) Drop the whole screening process. 2) Handcuff all the passengers to their seats for the duration of the flight. Needless to say, the first is not going to happen. And all this guy did was pushing us even more to the second solution, I am sure that the traveling experience is going to get significantly worse after this incident. I really don't understand what he was trying to prove, any person with more than two braincells knows that the process is ineffective anyway. But now someone in DoHS has to prove that they are working on the "problem" (even when they understand the futility of the approach), so I hope he enjoys the cavity search next time he has to fly.
They claim their work can be applied to any product or service and any advertising medium. And what presently requires sitting for those couple of sessions with Kowalick and Fantoni (at a cost of about $8,800) will soon be reduced to a $499 interactive software program that will run on a PC, bringing all the benefits of Taguchi without requiring that a nerd be enclosed to make it work.
The vanilla wafer recipe, however, will remain a secret.
U.S. and Canada: 888-642-9675 Worldwide: 1-703-742-0914
Btw, these 1-800 numbers show up all the time on/. whenever a new evil entity comes into fashion. Does anyone know if it is actually legal to spam someone's 1-800 number by just redialing it all the time or something similar? Or is there some obscure law that lets them come after you for this?
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, Acts of God can also sometimes be covered under insurance - after all, what's the point of wasting all that damn money on insurance if they can just turn on you and say, "Nope, that tree falling on your house last night during the freak ice storm was an Act of God" ?
;-)
Well, I had a sad experience with a certain web hosting company that had advertised "a guaranteed 99% uptime". The actual agreement excluded things like "acts of God" and of course they blamed each and every outage on God.
That DoS attack? Oh, that's simply an act of God, we can't do anything about it, no you can't get your money back.
I didn't bother suing them or anything like that but simply switched providers but I wonder if there's some law that actually determines the jurisdiction of God in such matters
The main impression that I get from the Wired list is "WTF, did they test their vehicles at all??"
Because 4 vehicles out of 13 didn't even get out of the start area!
I develop software for living, and while it is admittedly for easier tasks than autonomous desert-crossing, we test our product in hundreds and thousands of different situations and throw all kinds of shit at it to make sure it doesn't just die in some weird deployment scenario. I am really curious how much effort these teams spent on just testing their gear in different situations (not development).
A anti-geek as it may sound, I really can't see a need for 100% wireless coverage of any country large or small.
I really don't want to sit there and hear some guys talking about how they can watch their stock prices change second by second now, or some brat fragging a buddy whilst enjoying nature.
How is this different from having 100% cell phone service coverage? You could similarly say that it would be bothersome to have people talking on their cell phones everywhere and all the time.
This has actually nothing to do with coverage and everything to do with people's culture.
Estonia has had 100% cell coverage for a while now but I must say I find Estonian cell phone users less obtrusive than say, Americans (I live in the US most of the time but visit Estonia every now and then).
America is about 5 years behind Estonia and other frontrunners in Europe when it comes to embracing cell phones and going through the same problems Europe did (people using their phones as status symbols and showing off and being a pain in the ass). However, people have really embraced the cell phone culture and gotten over the initial growth pain, there's much more respect to other people, less showing off and more maturity in general. I expect America to catch up in a few years in that respect.
Similarly, wireless Internet will evolve through the same stages, there will be a period of adolescence and then maturity. In 10 years, wireless coverage will be everywhere and we will wonder how we ever got by without it (similar to regular Internet or cell phones today).
Just a sidenote, Neste is not Estonian company
Neither is Statoil. I believe the phrase "Estonia's major oil companies" should be read as "major oil companies operating in Estonia".
mirror
Absolutely phenomenal pictures.
One professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home broke down. He called a plumber. The plumber came on the next day, sealed a few screws and everything was working as before. The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. "This is one third of my monthly salary!" he yelled. Well, he paid and then the plumber said to him: "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply tell them that you completed only the seventh grade. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a plumber job and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly. One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber has to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check student's knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of the circle. The person who was ask was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he forgot the formula.
He started to reason it and soon filled the board with integrals, differentials and other advanced formulas to conclude the result that he had forgotten. As a result he got "negative pi times r squared." He didn't like the negative, so he started all over again. He got the negative sign again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a negative. He was frustrated. He looked a bit scared at the class and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
If your file system supported true symbolic links, your problem could be largely mitigated by using them.
So, let's say I want to have a view of all the images (and nothing but) that are:
1) taken by my friend
2) AND have EITHER me OR my wife on them
3) AND taken in New York City OR Boston
4) AND my wife has rated them with at least four stars out of five.
With WinFS + Longhorn shell I can actually easily create a view that has exactly these images.
How would I do it with symlinks again?
ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory.
No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.
So you're seriously suggesting that Microsoft is creating a new file system just for wedding photos and nothing else?
And you say that I should have a separate application for finding images, another one for finding music files, another one for documents, another one C programs and so on? Well thank you very much, I'd rather have a file system that lets me find all these in a uniform way, without having to install and learn a new app.
Manualy adding metadata to each of your 200+ wedding pictures looks so smarter than just creating an old fashioned directory "wedding pics" and moving them into it ...
Actually, Longhorn shell (based on demos that I've seen) makes adding metadata to 200 pictures as easy as creating a folder and then moving your pics into them. You can create a "stack" of pictures called "wedding pics" and move necessary stuff into it. After that you can create another stack which has "pictures with me on it" which is completely orthogonal to the previous stack and move another set of pictures to the other stack.
It is really quite similar to moving your files into directories except that:
1) they can belong to many different stacks at the same time
2) you can create views that contain arbitrary unions or intersections of the stacks (like "wedding pictures with me on it")
I can't wait to start using this wonderful FS
I guess that you were making a joke but I am seriously waiting for this to come out. I have currently several thousand digital pictures of various trips and events and finding a flexible, yet convenient organizing scheme for them is really hard, and WinFS would really help me out.
That's why you can change filenames and organize things into directories
This is completely missing the point.
First, directory name can hold just one piece of metadata. Filename can hold one more. So, sure, you can create a directory named "wedding photos" but what if I want to find all pictures where I am on? All pictures taken in New York City (regardless of the particular event)? All pictures of children? All pictures that my wife likes? You can't really solve these with directories, and that's why WinFS is necessary.
Die miserable painful death from bovine spongiform encephalopathy... or have my privacy invaded.
Or, die a miserable painful death caused by a terrorist act... or have your privacy invaded. At least following the government logic.
Both of these events have ridiculously low probabilities (mad cow being somewhat lower in my opinion) but somehow one is OK and the other isn't? Although I guess that most people think both are OK.
It always amazes me how easily people lose any common sense when whipped up by sensationalism and fearmongering (compare with the ridiculous hassles that people have to put up with because of terrorism fears). Have some perspective, for God's sake. Thousands of people die in traffic accidents all the time but no one thinks it's OK for traffic cops to search me every time when I drive (compare to airports) or come to my home to lecture me about traffic dangers (compare to this article).
Is this new player going to annoy me with constant reminders to update (which I've been ignoring so far since every update is even worse and more bloated, and the update process takes over my file associations)?
The spammers cost society more money than the US national debt -- every year.
I hate spam as much as anybody but what you're saying is absurd.
The US national debt is about 65-70% of US GDP. So you're saying that without spammers our GDP would be 65-70% higher? Ridiculous.
Well, Denmark is the oldest monerchy in the world, other than that you're probably right.
Actually, the Japanese monarchy dates back to 660 BC, making it by far the oldest in the world. Denmark's is more than thousand years younger, the starting date is not established precisely.
Check this page for more information on the different current and former monarchies of the world.
Something tells me that airlines and security people won't like the idea of people carrying 4 ounce cartridges of flammable pure methyl alcohol onboard flights.
As opposed to bringing any flammable liquid onboard in a soda bottle? People should already realize that the "extra security" in airports an other public places is an absurd waste of travelers' and taxpayers' time and money. It is possible to kill another person with a simple towel after a few weeks training. Glass from picture frames or many other everyday items can be very deadly.
The only way to keep people safe from each other is to handcuff them to their seats, so let's bring an end to this nonsense already.
The funny thing is, I don't actually remember the character sequence. Maybe it's because I play the piano, but I remember the hand motions of typing the password. So to pick a password I just generate a few random ones until I find one that "feels" okay.
;)
I do the same thing. However, it has sometimes been a bitch to reconstruct the real password when I've been traveling abroad and had to use a non-US keyboard which has a different layout, especially since I tend to mix some punctuation characters into the password
I second that. I saw the movie in the Kennedy Space Center; make sure you go to see it when you visit!
The interviewer says:
Microsoft, Lotus, Sun, and Novell seem to have settled on SIP. Intel, H-P, Hitachi, Sony, and more or less the entire open source world is going toward XMPP, sometimes better known as Jabber.
and the poster says:
Microsoft is pushing for SIP, everyone else seems to favor XMPP.
Yeah, it's fun to paint the world in black and white but this is just a blatant lie.
5 billion files are created every day.
3 billion of them will never be found again.
Poor files...
So far as I'm concerned (the illegality of his actions aside) he performed a public service.
Well, I for one am quite mad at the guy, here's why:
The problem for me is not terrorists, the chances of getting killed by a terrorist are ridiculously low. The problem is the screening process.
It is absolutely impossible to make passengers safe from each other on a commercial airplane. A piece of broken glass (from a picture frame) wrapped halfway in cloth is a very effective weapon. It is possible to make deadly weapons out of virtually anything, even towels or newspapers. The whole screening process is idiotic and doesn't do anything but waste my time and money, making air travel an experience that I try to avoid if at all possible.
Now there are two ways to "fix" the problem:
1) Drop the whole screening process.
2) Handcuff all the passengers to their seats for the duration of the flight.
Needless to say, the first is not going to happen. And all this guy did was pushing us even more to the second solution, I am sure that the traveling experience is going to get significantly worse after this incident.
I really don't understand what he was trying to prove, any person with more than two braincells knows that the process is ineffective anyway.
But now someone in DoHS has to prove that they are working on the "problem" (even when they understand the futility of the approach), so I hope he enjoys the cavity search next time he has to fly.
RIAA is trying to grant themselves powers that are outside of even the Patriot Act
Don't worry, that can surely be fixed. However, not necessarily the way most people here would like it to be.
imply run every startup script simultaneously, but have each script block until its dependencies have started.
Btw, this is pretty much what Windows XP does, that's how it achieves a much better boot time compared to earlier Windows versions.
From the article:
;)
They claim their work can be applied to any product or service and any advertising medium. And what presently requires sitting for those couple of sessions with Kowalick and Fantoni (at a cost of about $8,800) will soon be reduced to a $499 interactive software program that will run on a PC, bringing all the benefits of Taguchi without requiring that a nerd be enclosed to make it work.
The vanilla wafer recipe, however, will remain a secret.
Now where have I seen THAT before?
MS product bugs are posted about days before a patch comes out.
Actually, it is quite the opposite. With all the recent MS problems, patches have been out way before Slashdot or anybody else has noticed it.
U.S. and Canada: 888-642-9675
Worldwide: 1-703-742-0914
Btw, these 1-800 numbers show up all the time on
Does anyone know if it is actually legal to spam someone's 1-800 number by just redialing it all the time or something similar? Or is there some obscure law that lets them come after you for this?