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  1. Re:Non-story on Goldman Sachs Trading Source Code In the Wild? · · Score: 1

    The OP's point is not that you wouldn't be able to interpret the logic, but that the logic could be useless without the dataset it operates on. Cf. any statistical supervised learning algorithm that consume hand-labeled training samples.

  2. Re:High performance of C++ equal to D??? on Walter Bright Ports D To the Mac · · Score: 1
  3. Re:No one cares about D on Walter Bright Ports D To the Mac · · Score: 1

    But language design dictates how libraries are written and how they are used. The language design decisions directly and deeply influence the flexibility, safety, and ease with which one can interface with a library, compose libraries, and so on.

    Besides, we're already living in a world of C/Worse Is Better. D is a welcome exploration into improving the state of *systems programming*.

  4. Re:Does it really on MS Publishes Papers For a Modern, Secure Browser · · Score: 1

    In fact, many have concluded that the concept of independent kernel process cooperating via message passing, regardless of the tasks that they are attempting to perform, is inherently slower than single process monolithic designs and although object orientation allows greater flexability and abstraction it is always paid for in raw performance.

    http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/os/singularity/

  5. Re:Project Gutenburg on Open Library Project Takes Flight · · Score: 1

    So are you competing with Google Books?

  6. Thoughts on Zimbra, Sunbird, Exchange clones, etc. on Which Shared Calendar Package Would You Use? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Zimbra is a nice collaboration server with (web-based) email and calendaring. It's written in Java and has AJAX. I'm not sure how important it is to you to modify the calendar at the application level, but I'm sure you can at least export a (read-only) iCal feed from Zimbra.

    Sunbird's goal is to support reading and writing of iCal via CalDAV, but Sunbird is very immature and highly unstable.

    I haven't used these, but with Exchange server clones like Open-Xchange, you should be able to use Outlook. Not sure what Web interfaces they export, or what Web-based Exchange calendaring clients exist.

    Of course, make sure you didn't dismiss Google Calendar prematurely. This should suffice if you don't need too many bells/whistles, and it relieves you of many burdens. If you really want an application to use, you can use CalGoo, but this (very early-in-development) program has always been excrutiatingly slow for me (and I tried their latest beta draft).

  7. Been thinking about this problem for a long time on The Future of Packaging Software in Linux · · Score: 1

    A lot of the focus is on rpms, debs, epkgs, etc., but there's a large body software specific to certain development platforms - think CPAN, PyPI, Gems, ASDF, HackageDB, etc. Many dependencies exist in these repositories, so it's important that they be unified as well. This might not be as straightforward (or possible) as I hope; perhaps one must first think (much harder than I care to ATM) about how the modules across all these platforms should interface/bind to each other.

    Furthermore, there would ideally be smooth integration with non-snapshot versions of software (e.g. from local source files or source repositories like CVS/SVN/Darcs). This would particularly be useful for developers to actually run/debug their work.

    Until we can completely unify everything - which won't happen anytime soon - I feel the community should refrain from trying to come up with half-way solutions. IMO things like DJB's /package are hurting more than they're helping.

    I don't know much about it aside from a quick glance many years ago, but I remember .NET's package system being pretty well thought-out. Strongly named, signed assemblies are critical to preventing versioning hell (just experienced this with the Twill + BeautifulSoup combo in Python). I think the concepts there are simple and should be learned from.

    Anyway, until we have a unified software system, I highly recommend a little-known program named Toast for managing software that lies outside your distro's native package management system. It's a complete hack, but it's damned effective.

  8. Re:Apples to Oranges on Virtualization In Linux Kernel 2.6.20 · · Score: 2, Informative

    rtfa. not qemu, but qemu accelerator.

    http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-accel.htm l

  9. Re:Winner: Multicore on IEEE's Technology Winners & Losers of 2006 · · Score: 1

    O'Caml has side effects and is not a pure functional language.

    Also, see the work done on pH (Parallel Haskell): http://www.csg.lcs.mit.edu/projects/languages/ph.s html.

  10. Re:But will it... on Thinkpad X60 — the Tablet Goes Ultraportable · · Score: 1

    interesting. i had spent some time investigating linux tablet support but never learned about this. have you used this? i'm mainly wondering whether it has 'true' tablet application support, or if it's just using the tablet as a mouse. (i'd consider true tablet application support to the constant high rate 133hz sampling, plus a filtering engine that 'smooths'/'sharpens' lines.)

  11. Re:Other spam-fighting mail services on Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses · · Score: 1

    I guess I should add that a disadvantage of the latter two services is that explicit address creation is higher maintenance than Spamgourmet, with which one can create addresses on the fly. So even though bookmarklets make this pretty quick and painless, should you simply *forget* to create the inbox before submitting the form, you're screwed (you've lost that first message). From this perspective, watchwords seem like a simple-enough solution to the problem, meaning Spamgourmet's disadvantage is just its message cap.

  12. Other spam-fighting mail services on Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses · · Score: 2, Informative

    First, there are tons of other services that do this already. However, I personally am not very interested in expiring addresses; I frequently want to keep receiving mail at that address into the future (and some services simply don't allow you to update your email address, in which case you're screwed).

    Up until last year I've been using the popular (and open-source) Spamgourmet. It caps you at a max of 20 messages, though, so if you want to keep receiving mail at that address, you need to continually reset the message count (and a burst of mail exceeding the limit will result in lost messages). Furthermore, a lot of spammers have been targeting it lately, generating email address like blah1.yourusername@spamgourmet.com or blah2.yourusername@spamgourmet.com. Yes, you can solve this by requiring watchwords, but then you need to remember to add that substring into all your future email addresses.

    Another one that I've been using a bunch is mailnull.com, which lets you explicitly create addresses in the form of yourusername.ebay@mailnull.com. A disadvantage is that you cannot use it as an outgoing proxy for sending mail.

    Finally, there's sneakemail.com, which is like mailnull, except you work with completely mangled names (aw4jo48esaf9@sneakemail.com), and it does proxy outgoing mail (so I use it when signing up for things where I may want to reply, i.e. mailing lists). At first, the sneakemail site is a complete turn-off, but the service is probably the closest to what I'd want to use.

  13. Re:Why RTFA? on Why Vista Took So Long · · Score: 1

    isn't this how most distributed revision control systems work, including the one used in linux kernel development? you check things into lower level repositories more frequently than into higher level ones.

  14. Re:Google Talk Support on A First Look At Gaim 2.0 · · Score: 1

    someone else pointed out gizmo but there's also wengo, which is FOSS.

  15. Use OpenWengo instead! on Windows Live Messenger with VoIP · · Score: 1

    WengoPhone software is FOSS (GPL), cross-platform, and uses the SIP standard - all unlike Skype/Google Talk/Windows Live Messenger (though Skype is cross-platform). It's just as easy to use as the rest, so hopefully more people start using this. (I'm not affiliated with Wengo.)

  16. Re:Not the 1st: Wengo beat them to the punch on Firefox VoIP Client · · Score: 2, Informative

    Furthermore, the WengoPhone software is FOSS (GPL), unlike Skype and Google Talk, and it uses the SIP standard. Google only released a library (libjingle) for enabling A/V over XMPP (the Jabber protocol).

  17. Re:Hmmm... on Why Vista Release Date Really Slipped · · Score: 1

    Just to add - Windows also has a significantly larger base of existing software with which to maintain compatibility.

  18. Re:Where is "Case Sensitivity" on Linux Annoyances For Geeks · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you use bash much, then adding this to your .inputrc should alleviate some of the pain:

    set completion-ignore-case On

  19. Re:Slow links in post on Internet History In Pictures · · Score: 1

    You should fix those two links on http://www.mysticunderground.net/mirror/www.wbglin ks.net/.

  20. 42" not HDTV on Plasma TVs vs. LCD Projectors for Your Home Entertainment? · · Score: 1

    If you look on the page, only the 50" is labeled as HD.

  21. No way on MSN Planning to Take on Google? · · Score: 1

    Previous article

    MSN is always going to be bloated; there's no way it will ever match up to Google's ultra-slim, yet high-quality engine.

  22. 0 posts and already slashdotted... on Model Train Control Using Your PDA · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a mirror.

  23. "See You, Space Cowboy!" on Review: Cowboy Bebop · · Score: 1

    I've been looking forward to this release for a long time. Cowboy Bebop is far and away my favorite anime series. It's just so...COOL! Though the movie is excellent, I hope it'll also serve the audience as an introduction to the series.

    The movie takes place near the end of the series, after episode 24. All the main characters are here, as well as the outstanding jazzy soundtrack.

  24. Re:Standards? on Public Standards: C# 2, Java 0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, Microsoft did release another .NET runtime called Rotor. It's shared-source and cross-platform. They made the implementation run on FreeBSD.

  25. How is this secure? on Digital Restrictions Management in Office 11 · · Score: 1

    If the implementation depends only software, with no hardware support, wouldn't it only be a matter of time before the encryption is broken?

    Besides, one can easily copy the information by setting up a few simple macros that image-copy each screenful of the document, perhaps running OCR and reformatting on the image set.