Its' not the cost to date, but this morning's Metro stated:
The BBC announced last month it would remove the sites from the web as part of cuts to its £34million online budget. It is also axing 360 staff.
and
While the torrent was created anonymously, some sources have suggested that the person behind it is Ben Metcalfe, also known as dotBen, who posted a link to the archive on Twitter with the message: ‘So here it is... if you want to download the torrent backup of all the sites the BBC are closing.’
Metcalfe is a former BBC software engineer, who helped launch the BBC blog network, now living in the US.
Or people with friends who only use random cartoon characters as their profile pictures.
(In my case, that would be pictures of pets. So yeah, that's going to work)
Given that the ToS implies you're not supposed to put false or misleading information into profiles in the first place, presumably this will lead to pressure on the offending parties (from fellow users) to conform. Which is fair enough.
...and also increases the quality of the underlying data, which I can see is an outcome that's going to have its detractors...
While Sodoku is usually played with a 9x9 board, any square number would work. 4x4, 16x16, I've even seen a 25x25 in a Sodoku book before. (Started it, but didn't want to spend that much free time finishing it.) Technically you could have a 1x1 board but there's not much fun in that!
It isn't necessary to have a square number
size, it just means that you are forced out of
having a puzzle comprising row-, column- and
square-based "house"s when you do. Various
polyomino forms have been done, from plain
rectangular to the the "Squiggly" variety at dailysudoku.co.uk
Being reasonably competent at the various
9x9 forms (I seek puzzles online because the
only puzzle I've found in the national press
that I can't solve is the
supposed-world's hardest
[solution]),
I can't see that there's any great
complication possible in one of 4x4 size,
although I'd imagine it was precisely the
point to have *some* complexity but not
*lots*.
every time I try to run the Compaq XP Recover CD, it gives me an error: "Not enough free space."
You don't say anything about the model or age
of this laptop, but if it's anything like the
Compaq I had then its install disk will want
to make multiple partitions (some of which
will be specially marked) on the disk and
get upset if there aren't enough free slots or
decides it doesn't dare risk trashing a
existing system if it finds one (especially
likely since you've currently got one that
clearly isn't Windows).
This was a while ago, but something
roughly analogous is true of the more-recent
EeePC 700 series where Linux versions have
(AIUI) a system, user, and and additional
DOS-readable partition for handling BIOS
updates.
If you're lucky you'll find that the Linux
install you completed recognised a valid
partition table and backed up the relevant
disk sector, complete with any magic bytes
that may or may not have been originally
there [Google can advise if these are
necessary!] compared to what's in the standard
Linux MBR.
If not, you couldn't do worse than 'dd' a
sector's worth of zero bytes over the
existing partition table and see if your
reinstall disk starts to behave as a result of
blanking it completely, putting Linux back
again if you really have to.
Lazy, astigmatic, squinted, and very happy to have seen Avatar's 3D effect
work:)
Background: I get kind of travel sick with FPS games and can't do Magic Eye at
all, but have successfully observed 3D film presentations before (a six-minute
ride at the National Space
Centre which I felt only kind-of-worked but looking back I was probably
suffering the FPS effect too much to gauge it effectively).
I had at least been firmly forewarned that staring at the out-of-focus things
to try to "fix" them would disconcert, so I knew what to expect to an extent. One
of my 20/20 friends had nothing of this, however, and he got the headaches
something rotten! Go figure.
I take the amount of time I think it will take, double it and move it up a time unit.
So, if I think it will take two days, I estimate 4 weeks. If I think it will take a week, I estimate two months and so on.
Mod parent insightful. I actually worked somewhere this
was reasonably sensible; okay, the granularity of what
we actually had was "hours", "mornings",
"days", "weeks", "fortnights", "months" - (pretty much
doubling again, looking back at it written down), but
there really were so many meetings and other overheads
that it made sense (that's probably what killed us, but
I digress).
...and then sometimes management did the same again,
which was nice. One demo I delivered in the predicted
"few days tops" (including several additional features I
anticipated followup requests for) which "we told [the
customer] we'd need three months". The graphics design
guy got plenty of time to beautify it and everyone was
*very* happy:)
We've managed to land several rovers on Mars. How many Martian rovers have landed on Earth? Zero. I suggest that our missile defenses are quite adequate.
If you believe that, I've got a spray that keeps elephants off your garden to sell you!
In PHP I once had a bug in the whitespace of a comment.
When I left the/* and */ away, and the comment just stood there as if it were code, it worked.
Go figure...
Nested comments maybe? If you hadn't noticed the
outer comment markers, you'd get something that "didn't"
work with the inner markers in place and "did" work
without.
(In PHP, attempting to nest comments leads to the
second '/*' being considered as enveloped by the first '/*'
and the first '*/', leading to the second '*/' being
flagged as erroneous, and the interpreter bailing out)
// writing my first bit of non-trivial PHP _today_
My netbook (an ASUS EeePC) came with gpg installed. So far, so good. Now, if the default installation would have used a path pointing to a USB drive mount point instead of ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf, then (assuming the cops didn't find that one memory stick) I could plausibly deny that I had ever used gpg. All distros come with it and, although I may have used USB drives, they'd have to find one with gpg.conf to prove I've been encrypting data.
(Bind-)mount over ~/.gnupg? I do a similar thing on my
EeePC for ~/.mozilla, although in my case it's to keep the
browser cache off the internal drive when I've got the
resources to do so. Whether it's possible to keep the
command out of any history files made by $SHELL in an invisible/innocuous manner is another matter, of course
(and not necessary in my scenario).
Construction of the device is more difficult when everyone's shirt, shoes, and underwear has a chip, as the detector then has to know what kinds of codes are in ID cards of various types.
...at which point we could back up whether Commandos
do actually "go Commando" with real statistics!
// Suddenly not at all curious about whether
it's true...
Incidentally, this is not the first time this particular maker of this particular homeopathic drug has been a cause of this particular health concern.
...and backed up by Snopes, I notice this morning (at http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/zicam.asp; status still "undetermined" despite being "collected via email, October 2006").
Interesting?? Assume the universe is infinite. If I look left, there is an infinite distance between me an the restaurant in that direction. If I look up, same thing, infinite distance. Right, down, forward, backward, same thing. The center of something is defined as the point where the distance between all opposing points is the same. Therefore, I am the center of the universe.
Hardly. See that "has to be the same"? That's where the problem in the reasoning lies: the distances you observe may all be infinite, i.e. immeasurably large, but just because they're "equally" immeasurable doesn't automatically mean they were ever equal as distinct quantities!
If Tom Tom wants to enter the game they must license their IP from someone with a patent portfolio [...] This is just the warning shot. If companies like ASUS and Acer don't get the message expect an example to be made of one of the netbook makers soon.
Bad example? As an Eee owner, I'm fairly confident Asus aren't pushing their luck in the same way. The distro self-advertises as Xandros in a number of places where program titlebars haven't been sanitised to match their labels in the launcher, and Xandros are well known for having a Novell-style "interoperability" Microsoft deal.
This article mentions that IE7 starts new processes when following a link from one "security zone" to another, and IE8 starts new processes for each tab. So MicroSoft will break their own browsers as well if your concern that applications and their processes[/threads?] differ has any weight:)
It runs a browser and nothing else on top of a custom Linux build.
When it ways "and nothing else" does it mean "nothing else except the linux build, fully featured and usable to do whatever you need including changing the browser, upgrading using the toy to read documents in whatever format you download readers for, etc."?
The summary is a little misleading. While the article does indeed state they are currently "running a full install of Ubuntu Linux", it is the Fusion Garage blog links which suggest the final install will be considerably more slimline. There certainly won't be much space in the 4GB storage once a fully-featured Ubuntu is in there!
Slashdot Mirror
"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but..."
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's ... because we're standing on the shoulders of giants?
Its' not the cost to date, but this morning's Metro stated:
The BBC announced last month it would remove the sites from the web as part of cuts to its £34million online budget. It is also axing 360 staff.
and
While the torrent was created anonymously, some sources have suggested that the person behind it is Ben Metcalfe, also known as dotBen, who posted a link to the archive on Twitter with the message: ‘So here it is... if you want to download the torrent backup of all the sites the BBC are closing.’
Metcalfe is a former BBC software engineer, who helped launch the BBC blog network, now living in the US.
Am I too old for knowing immediately what the root cause for this was?
Sounds to me like you're just the right age for knowing what the root cause was!
The porn industry only knows how to make movies and they don't know how to get the viewer a bit involved in the action.
Pft. If you're not getting a bit more involved, you're doing it wrong ;)
Or people with friends who only use random cartoon characters as their profile pictures.
(In my case, that would be pictures of pets. So yeah, that's going to work)
Given that the ToS implies you're not supposed to put false or misleading information into profiles in the first place, presumably this will lead to pressure on the offending parties (from fellow users) to conform. Which is fair enough.
...and also increases the quality of the underlying data, which I can see is an outcome that's going to have its detractors...
"Well, I'll give him another twenty minutes; but that's it!"
While Sodoku is usually played with a 9x9 board, any square number would work. 4x4, 16x16, I've even seen a 25x25 in a Sodoku book before. (Started it, but didn't want to spend that much free time finishing it.) Technically you could have a 1x1 board but there's not much fun in that!
It isn't necessary to have a square number size, it just means that you are forced out of having a puzzle comprising row-, column- and square-based "house"s when you do. Various polyomino forms have been done, from plain rectangular to the the "Squiggly" variety at dailysudoku.co.uk
Being reasonably competent at the various 9x9 forms (I seek puzzles online because the only puzzle I've found in the national press that I can't solve is the supposed-world's hardest [solution]), I can't see that there's any great complication possible in one of 4x4 size, although I'd imagine it was precisely the point to have *some* complexity but not *lots*.
every time I try to run the Compaq XP Recover CD, it gives me an error: "Not enough free space."
You don't say anything about the model or age of this laptop, but if it's anything like the Compaq I had then its install disk will want to make multiple partitions (some of which will be specially marked) on the disk and get upset if there aren't enough free slots or decides it doesn't dare risk trashing a existing system if it finds one (especially likely since you've currently got one that clearly isn't Windows). This was a while ago, but something roughly analogous is true of the more-recent EeePC 700 series where Linux versions have (AIUI) a system, user, and and additional DOS-readable partition for handling BIOS updates.
If you're lucky you'll find that the Linux install you completed recognised a valid partition table and backed up the relevant disk sector, complete with any magic bytes that may or may not have been originally there [Google can advise if these are necessary!] compared to what's in the standard Linux MBR. If not, you couldn't do worse than 'dd' a sector's worth of zero bytes over the existing partition table and see if your reinstall disk starts to behave as a result of blanking it completely, putting Linux back again if you really have to.
Better still:
"had they used the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula"...
You don't think calling the implementation "DistBbp" suggests they did?
Lazy, astigmatic, squinted, and very happy to have seen Avatar's 3D effect work :)
Background: I get kind of travel sick with FPS games and can't do Magic Eye at all, but have successfully observed 3D film presentations before (a six-minute ride at the National Space Centre which I felt only kind-of-worked but looking back I was probably suffering the FPS effect too much to gauge it effectively).
I had at least been firmly forewarned that staring at the out-of-focus things to try to "fix" them would disconcert, so I knew what to expect to an extent. One of my 20/20 friends had nothing of this, however, and he got the headaches something rotten! Go figure.
I take the amount of time I think it will take, double it and move it up a time unit. So, if I think it will take two days, I estimate 4 weeks. If I think it will take a week, I estimate two months and so on.
Mod parent insightful. I actually worked somewhere this was reasonably sensible; okay, the granularity of what we actually had was "hours", "mornings", "days", "weeks", "fortnights", "months" - (pretty much doubling again, looking back at it written down), but there really were so many meetings and other overheads that it made sense (that's probably what killed us, but I digress).
Ubuntu has a logo?
Sure it has. There's even a "parody" of it.
We've managed to land several rovers on Mars. How many Martian rovers have landed on Earth? Zero. I suggest that our missile defenses are quite adequate.
If you believe that, I've got a spray that keeps elephants off your garden to sell you!
early 90s Pentiums were the first CPUs to spark the "you could fry an egg" jokes
At first people ignored that, then they laughed at it, and then they fou^H^H^Hfried it
What gives you the right to say that? You're generalising my generation. ... That's not very fair of you.
Heh, I said the same thing when I was your age.
Mod parent funny
...and the article he posted.
In PHP I once had a bug in the whitespace of a comment. When I left the /* and */ away, and the comment just stood there as if it were code, it worked.
Go figure...
Nested comments maybe? If you hadn't noticed the outer comment markers, you'd get something that "didn't" work with the inner markers in place and "did" work without.
(In PHP, attempting to nest comments leads to the second '/*' being considered as enveloped by the first '/*' and the first '*/', leading to the second '*/' being flagged as erroneous, and the interpreter bailing out)
My netbook (an ASUS EeePC) came with gpg installed. So far, so good. Now, if the default installation would have used a path pointing to a USB drive mount point instead of ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf, then (assuming the cops didn't find that one memory stick) I could plausibly deny that I had ever used gpg. All distros come with it and, although I may have used USB drives, they'd have to find one with gpg.conf to prove I've been encrypting data.
(Bind-)mount over ~/.gnupg? I do a similar thing on my EeePC for ~/.mozilla, although in my case it's to keep the browser cache off the internal drive when I've got the resources to do so. Whether it's possible to keep the command out of any history files made by $SHELL in an invisible/innocuous manner is another matter, of course (and not necessary in my scenario).
Construction of the device is more difficult when everyone's shirt, shoes, and underwear has a chip, as the detector then has to know what kinds of codes are in ID cards of various types.
...at which point we could back up whether Commandos do actually "go Commando" with real statistics!
// Suddenly not at all curious about whether it's true...
Incidentally, this is not the first time this particular maker of this particular homeopathic drug has been a cause of this particular health concern.
It is better with Windows
No, no: IT's better with Windows
...whereas CS is better with Linux
Interesting?? Assume the universe is infinite. If I look left, there is an infinite distance between me an the restaurant in that direction. If I look up, same thing, infinite distance. Right, down, forward, backward, same thing. The center of something is defined as the point where the distance between all opposing points is the same. Therefore, I am the center of the universe.
Hardly. See that "has to be the same"? That's where the problem in the reasoning lies: the distances you observe may all be infinite, i.e. immeasurably large, but just because they're "equally" immeasurable doesn't automatically mean they were ever equal as distinct quantities!
If Tom Tom wants to enter the game they must license their IP from someone with a patent portfolio [...] This is just the warning shot. If companies like ASUS and Acer don't get the message expect an example to be made of one of the netbook makers soon.
Bad example? As an Eee owner, I'm fairly confident Asus aren't pushing their luck in the same way. The distro self-advertises as Xandros in a number of places where program titlebars haven't been sanitised to match their labels in the launcher, and Xandros are well known for having a Novell-style "interoperability" Microsoft deal.
Someone else can speak up for Acer...
Since each Chrome tab runs in a separate process, will users not be able to open several Chrome tabs?
Likewise for each plugin Chrome runs.
This article mentions that IE7 starts new processes when following a link from one "security zone" to another, and IE8 starts new processes for each tab. So MicroSoft will break their own browsers as well if your concern that applications and their processes[/threads?] differ has any weight :)
It runs a browser and nothing else on top of a custom Linux build.
When it ways "and nothing else" does it mean "nothing else except the linux build, fully featured and usable to do whatever you need including changing the browser, upgrading using the toy to read documents in whatever format you download readers for, etc."?
The summary is a little misleading. While the article does indeed state they are currently "running a full install of Ubuntu Linux", it is the Fusion Garage blog links which suggest the final install will be considerably more slimline. There certainly won't be much space in the 4GB storage once a fully-featured Ubuntu is in there!