Fuck, messed up the quote, damn boards with their crappy syntax:D
If you use Firefox you can install the Slashdotter extension. In addition to several handy options for tweaking Slashdot, you get a nice "Reply to selected text"-option when right-clicking. This inserts a blockquote for you. Recommended!
Opera is an awesome browser. It's fast, in many respects it's better than Firefox. The only reason why I don't use Opera full time is a lack of something like adblock. Yes, I know you kan keep a killfile of filtered urls, but I can do that already with my hosts file. Firefox is just generally better for my taste. Of course, any version of IE is out of the question, because of a lack of non-evilness:)
Anyone who values their privacy won't sign up for this.
Of course we won't. This adds no value for my part. If someone wants to know where I am they can send me a text. If we're supposed to meet at a place they don't know, I can send them and address, GPS coordinates, or even a screenshot from my phone's map application. I see few non-scary applications for this. Then again I *am* a little paranoid, YMMV:)
Good luck keeping your friends! (And I mean that in the old, real-life sense.)
I've expressed to my friends with accounts on facebook that I don't want to be in any picture on facebook, not even a "look, here we are at a table in this pub"-picture. It's been respected as far as I know, an no one has had an issue with it. Maybe I just have reasonable friends:)
The real fix is to use some sort of open / distributed social networking system (so it is more like e-mail/Jabber), but I do not know of any real solution in that area.
I use email, phone and (for some groups) online forums to keep track of my friends. It works very well. Old friends can easily get hold of me if they want to, and I can look up anyone I'd like to contact.
I made an account on facebook a couple of years ago, mostly to check out how it worked. After getting tired of the various annoyances and concerned about the privacy issues I deleted as much as possible from my account after two weeks. I had only very basic info and a custom forwarded mail-address registered anyway. I kept getting "This-or-that guy has searched for your name. Sure you don't want to reactivate?"-mails for months afterwards, finally I just marked them as spam in the custom gmail account, 'cause that's what they were.
When people complain that I'm not on facebook I explain why, and no-one has had any problems with that. Two mates even quit as well due to things I told them. When something happens in a friends life, or I'm in their town, I contact them and meet over a pint or a coffee instead. I don't really need to know exactly when peripheral friends are "bored" or "at the gym", maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way:)
>It's for Joe public. No, HTML is not that hard to you and me, but my wife has no idea what it even is, let alone work out the wonders of CSS markup. Facebook takes all that away from ordinary, non-IT people. They fire up a web browser, and that's it.
Or maybe markup is a little difficult? No offence, but I found that somewhat ironic. Sorry:)
I had to chuckle the last time I was in the bank. The accountant had this little glass pad for signing electronically at the desk. Someone had signed it with a pen, the name was perfectly legible. Basically she left her name to indicate that she's stupid. All the banks have had these for years, it's very strange that someone doesn't know how to use them...
I am confused, so does Linux server have high uptime or not?
While it's possible to have a high uptime on any OS with proper maintenance, it's horrible for security. There are many patches that can't be done without a reboot (Linux kernel update without some very fancy hacks, many more on Windows).
A system that's been going 24/7 for a few years is probably not patched properly for a long time. Additionally you'll want to check once in a while that your box will come back online properly with all services running in the event of a power failure. Even with generators, UPSes and whatnot someone CAN yank the wrong power cable by mistake:)
If you need high availability you go for redundancy. You have an identical hot spare server for upgrading and unexpected downtime, or if pressed for funds, you have a less beefy server that you patch and bring online during low traffic periods while you maintain your main server. Or you virtualize the whole server, making switchovers seamless. Even if your main virtual server for some service crashes and burns, the spare will lurk in the background on the same physical box and not consume much resources until it's needed.
A good hosting service, for instance, will shuffle your files between physical and virtual servers while they patch and upgrade their OS and server software. This is done transparently to the end user, ensuring that your site is always online.
Someone with more experience in HA networking can surely expand on this and correct me, but long uptime generally != good.
When I think about it it's probably not very prudent to do, since you'll never be able to fine-tune it enough for most uses. You'd never know either if the customer didn't contact you in other manners.
I would hate for my client to lose business because legitimate customers can't access their site. I'll just put my faith in the provider's update routines and my own code:)
This seems like a really good idea, and a no-brainer if it works well. But how do you ensure that you make no errors of type 1 (a fellow national can't view the site)? I'll want ALL of the residents of a few countries to be able to access the site, even if that means that a few others can access it as well.
Furthermore I have no idea what IPs hotels, mobile phone providers, offshore workers, restaurant chains and probably many more I haven't though of will give their customers.
Of course, quite a few musicians trade the autotune 'perfect' output as an alternative to creativity
When a good artist uses technology to enhance his/her music, that's perfectly OK. When autotune is used to mask a lack of artistic ability, it destroys the credibility of the whole package. Come on, it's not that difficult to sing in tune... even I can do it, even though my voice is not great to start with. If you need autotune you have no business being behind a mike in the first place.
The first thing a good vocalist will do is probably learn to sing in tune. After that, he/she will learn to exploit other qualities of the voice, such as dropping out of perfect pitch once in a while for effect and character. There's no such thing as a singer who only lacks the ability to keep pitch, but is otherwise great:)
For me it's easy, though. I keep away from the mass-produced one-hit-wonder crap, and support the good artists that actually strives and work themselves to deliver quality. "Artists" from the corporate conveyor belt may have their audience among teenagers and people who are not really interested in music, but I am glad there still are real artists who creates good material with artistic value. I support them, and the list of concerts I've been to proves it.
Why so expensive? Have you priced violas recently?
Heh, nice:) It baffles me that this mistake is so widespread, the pronunciation is substantially different. Maybe people are using words they don't know the meaning of?
I knew the concept, but didn't know that name. Thanks:) Out of curiosity, is there a name for the converse error? As in, I need to divide this rope into five parts, how many cuts do I need to make?
Don't worry, you're not the first person I've met who fancied himself a nerd and couldn't do date math properly.
I worked part-time scanning course packs which also included chapters from books. I've had to explain to both math and CS majors that, for instance, pages 13-24 is actually not eleven pages. I've had to count on my fingers for several people. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't stop to think (or you don't scan course packs).
Actually, I find it most strange that the CS-guy didn't recognise the off-by-one error:)
Perhaps, they are so different that they are also looking for life but with an entirely different definition.
Yes, I've thought about that as well. Maybe they don't understand the concept of curiosity? They may be like birds on an island, communicating happily (and intelligibly) among themselves, but as they're doing well, they don't feel the need to move.
Maybe the have evolved into one single consciousness, so that communication and the concept of other entities has become entirely strange to them/it.
Kind of blows the whole concept of bandwidth out of the water, doesn't it? When you can instantly duplicate bits of information to a machine at any location...
"Oh my gosh, you solved their problem. They can achieve 90%, you only need to implement an error correcting algorithm capable of handling 10% of error, and you have achieved instant information transmission!". No, really, I find their results intriguing, but that was not my point at all:)
While I agree with you, it is one way of cathing the public's eye. Journalists want to make headlines, when they can't, they make up headlines remotely tangential to whatever material they've got.
My beef is with the Slashdot editors; when I started reading Slashdot, it was because the editors chose interesting stories. They still do, this is interesting, but they choose to present this particular mainstream article as the only link in their ingress as documentation and background information. I find that sad.
Seriously... from the title of the article: "Teleportation Is Real" (picture from Startrek).
From the article: "For scientists, it's [teleportation] just very, very complex, so much so that at this point, teleportation is not a matter of moving matter but one of transporting information."
Substance of article: "It doesn't work reliably, but might be useful for not-yet-existing computers".
While this is interesting, I can't help but thinking that more to-the-point article about the real achievements of this group might be more interesting to the/. crowd. Finding one is left as an exercise for the reader:)
I just realised the GP post was aiming for a funny... so my post is in response to the mods giving him an insightful. I, in turn, blame this misunderstanding on the good people from Islay:)
Why take a game where you pretend to shoot people and modify it so you are pretending to pretend to shoot people?
Because the people who spend their time to develop it chose to do so? They might have any one of a bunch of reasons, why do you care? Just don't enable that option if you don't like it. It's an easy solution to a non-existent problem.
Re:Motion for Charlie Stross seconded
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
Ah yes, I've read a couple of his stories (Printcrime, Anda's Game), they are quite good. Thanks for reminding me:) It seems like a lot of his works are on feedbooks as well, I'll check it out. BTW, I'm not affiliated with feedbooks or anything, just very impressed:) I recommend it to anyone with a digital reader.
Re:Motion for Charlie Stross seconded
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
Peter Watts is also pretty good for a nano- look at future crime.
After finally getting my hands on an iLiad, I started off with some classics, and have now started on Watts. I'm nearly through with his first novel Starfish, and intend to read the rest. I really like feedbooks, you couldn't by any chance recommend something else from there if I like Watts?
I'll probably stumble upon it eventually, but there is so incredibly many free books out there, it would be nice to have some pointers:) Reading digital novels hasn't really been an option for me before I tried the iLiad.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use Firefox you can install the Slashdotter extension. In addition to several handy options for tweaking Slashdot, you get a nice "Reply to selected text"-option when right-clicking. This inserts a blockquote for you. Recommended!
Opera is an awesome browser. It's fast, in many respects it's better than Firefox. :)
The only reason why I don't use Opera full time is a lack of something like adblock. Yes, I know you kan keep a killfile of filtered urls, but I can do that already with my hosts file. Firefox is just generally better for my taste.
Of course, any version of IE is out of the question, because of a lack of non-evilness
Yes, sorry about that. I didn't refresh the story before replying, or I would've seen that you already caught it.
Of course we won't. This adds no value for my part. If someone wants to know where I am they can send me a text. If we're supposed to meet at a place they don't know, I can send them and address, GPS coordinates, or even a screenshot from my phone's map application. :)
I see few non-scary applications for this. Then again I *am* a little paranoid, YMMV
I've expressed to my friends with accounts on facebook that I don't want to be in any picture on facebook, not even a "look, here we are at a table in this pub"-picture. It's been respected as far as I know, an no one has had an issue with it. Maybe I just have reasonable friends :)
I use email, phone and (for some groups) online forums to keep track of my friends. It works very well. Old friends can easily get hold of me if they want to, and I can look up anyone I'd like to contact.
I made an account on facebook a couple of years ago, mostly to check out how it worked. After getting tired of the various annoyances and concerned about the privacy issues I deleted as much as possible from my account after two weeks. I had only very basic info and a custom forwarded mail-address registered anyway. I kept getting "This-or-that guy has searched for your name. Sure you don't want to reactivate?"-mails for months afterwards, finally I just marked them as spam in the custom gmail account, 'cause that's what they were.
When people complain that I'm not on facebook I explain why, and no-one has had any problems with that. Two mates even quit as well due to things I told them. When something happens in a friends life, or I'm in their town, I contact them and meet over a pint or a coffee instead. I don't really need to know exactly when peripheral friends are "bored" or "at the gym", maybe I'm just old-fashioned that way :)
>It's for Joe public. No, HTML is not that hard to you and me, but my wife has no idea what it even is, let alone work out the wonders of CSS markup. Facebook takes all that away from ordinary, non-IT people. They fire up a web browser, and that's it.
Or maybe markup is a little difficult? No offence, but I found that somewhat ironic. Sorry :)
I had to chuckle the last time I was in the bank. The accountant had this little glass pad for signing electronically at the desk. Someone had signed it with a pen, the name was perfectly legible. Basically she left her name to indicate that she's stupid.
All the banks have had these for years, it's very strange that someone doesn't know how to use them...
As depicted by Doom as a tool for system administration
While it's possible to have a high uptime on any OS with proper maintenance, it's horrible for security. There are many patches that can't be done without a reboot (Linux kernel update without some very fancy hacks, many more on Windows).
A system that's been going 24/7 for a few years is probably not patched properly for a long time. Additionally you'll want to check once in a while that your box will come back online properly with all services running in the event of a power failure. Even with generators, UPSes and whatnot someone CAN yank the wrong power cable by mistake :)
If you need high availability you go for redundancy. You have an identical hot spare server for upgrading and unexpected downtime, or if pressed for funds, you have a less beefy server that you patch and bring online during low traffic periods while you maintain your main server. Or you virtualize the whole server, making switchovers seamless. Even if your main virtual server for some service crashes and burns, the spare will lurk in the background on the same physical box and not consume much resources until it's needed.
A good hosting service, for instance, will shuffle your files between physical and virtual servers while they patch and upgrade their OS and server software. This is done transparently to the end user, ensuring that your site is always online.
Someone with more experience in HA networking can surely expand on this and correct me, but long uptime generally != good.
When I think about it it's probably not very prudent to do, since you'll never be able to fine-tune it enough for most uses. You'd never know either if the customer didn't contact you in other manners.
I would hate for my client to lose business because legitimate customers can't access their site. I'll just put my faith in the provider's update routines and my own code :)
This seems like a really good idea, and a no-brainer if it works well. But how do you ensure that you make no errors of type 1 (a fellow national can't view the site)? I'll want ALL of the residents of a few countries to be able to access the site, even if that means that a few others can access it as well.
Furthermore I have no idea what IPs hotels, mobile phone providers, offshore workers, restaurant chains and probably many more I haven't though of will give their customers.
How is this usually done?
When a good artist uses technology to enhance his/her music, that's perfectly OK. When autotune is used to mask a lack of artistic ability, it destroys the credibility of the whole package. Come on, it's not that difficult to sing in tune... even I can do it, even though my voice is not great to start with. If you need autotune you have no business being behind a mike in the first place.
The first thing a good vocalist will do is probably learn to sing in tune. After that, he/she will learn to exploit other qualities of the voice, such as dropping out of perfect pitch once in a while for effect and character. There's no such thing as a singer who only lacks the ability to keep pitch, but is otherwise great :)
For me it's easy, though. I keep away from the mass-produced one-hit-wonder crap, and support the good artists that actually strives and work themselves to deliver quality. "Artists" from the corporate conveyor belt may have their audience among teenagers and people who are not really interested in music, but I am glad there still are real artists who creates good material with artistic value. I support them, and the list of concerts I've been to proves it.
DMA forensics, now *that* is scary. :)
Sorry
Heh, nice :)
It baffles me that this mistake is so widespread, the pronunciation is substantially different. Maybe people are using words they don't know the meaning of?
I knew the concept, but didn't know that name. Thanks :)
Out of curiosity, is there a name for the converse error? As in, I need to divide this rope into five parts, how many cuts do I need to make?
I worked part-time scanning course packs which also included chapters from books. I've had to explain to both math and CS majors that, for instance, pages 13-24 is actually not eleven pages. I've had to count on my fingers for several people. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't stop to think (or you don't scan course packs).
Actually, I find it most strange that the CS-guy didn't recognise the off-by-one error :)
Yes, I've thought about that as well. Maybe they don't understand the concept of curiosity? They may be like birds on an island, communicating happily (and intelligibly) among themselves, but as they're doing well, they don't feel the need to move.
Maybe the have evolved into one single consciousness, so that communication and the concept of other entities has become entirely strange to them/it.
It might well be something along the lines of "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." (J. B. S. Haldane)
"Oh my gosh, you solved their problem. They can achieve 90%, you only need to implement an error correcting algorithm capable of handling 10% of error, and you have achieved instant information transmission!". :)
No, really, I find their results intriguing, but that was not my point at all
While I agree with you, it is one way of cathing the public's eye. Journalists want to make headlines, when they can't, they make up headlines remotely tangential to whatever material they've got.
My beef is with the Slashdot editors; when I started reading Slashdot, it was because the editors chose interesting stories. They still do, this is interesting, but they choose to present this particular mainstream article as the only link in their ingress as documentation and background information. I find that sad.
Seriously... from the title of the article: "Teleportation Is Real" (picture from Startrek).
From the article: "For scientists, it's [teleportation] just very, very complex, so much so that at this point, teleportation is not a matter of moving matter but one of transporting information."
Substance of article: "It doesn't work reliably, but might be useful for not-yet-existing computers".
While this is interesting, I can't help but thinking that more to-the-point article about the real achievements of this group might be more interesting to the /. crowd. Finding one is left as an exercise for the reader :)
I just realised the GP post was aiming for a funny... so my post is in response to the mods giving him an insightful. I, in turn, blame this misunderstanding on the good people from Islay :)
Because the people who spend their time to develop it chose to do so? They might have any one of a bunch of reasons, why do you care? Just don't enable that option if you don't like it. It's an easy solution to a non-existent problem.
Ah yes, I've read a couple of his stories (Printcrime, Anda's Game), they are quite good. Thanks for reminding me :) :)
It seems like a lot of his works are on feedbooks as well, I'll check it out.
BTW, I'm not affiliated with feedbooks or anything, just very impressed
I recommend it to anyone with a digital reader.
After finally getting my hands on an iLiad, I started off with some classics, and have now started on Watts. I'm nearly through with his first novel Starfish, and intend to read the rest. I really like feedbooks, you couldn't by any chance recommend something else from there if I like Watts?
I'll probably stumble upon it eventually, but there is so incredibly many free books out there, it would be nice to have some pointers :)
Reading digital novels hasn't really been an option for me before I tried the iLiad.