Despite all recent negative publicity, Fedora is a great distro for the hobbyist desktop. I've been running FC1 since its release without any problems. I wish they'd stuck to 3 CDs though. IIRC, the 4th CD consists of lots of languages (and nothing else) so most people can skip it. Kernel 2.6, gnome 2.6, kde 3.2... can't wait.
There weren't any "surprises given the last publicly viewable rankings". There are two sets of awards given out: the Webby award and the People's choice award. The former is decided by the academy and the latter by popular vote. The publicly viewable rankings are for the People's choice award. The nominated websites usually advertise it on their front page and get their readers to spam the people's choice vote, reducing it to a most-visited-site contest. Therefore, IMNSHO, the people's choice award is not very meaningful. For the Webby award itself there is no indication of who the winners are going to be before the final announcement.
Being from an underdeveloped country myself, I find that due to the paucity of information, the first distro to get a foot in the door (Redhat) quickly acquires a monopoly. Have you observed the same thing?
Mozilla is starting the drive to firefox 1.0, and Ben Goodger (the firefox guy) is requesting that everyone report/nominate their most favorite bugs so that they have a better chance of getting fixed.
They're playing for big stakes, and a lot of things have to go right.
Since they're offering 1GB, and are doubtless counting on the user not being able to use up all of that immediately, their rate throttling measures had better be really good. If spammers/warez doodz find a way to exploit the system and automate the client interface, then google will probably have to retract their offer, which will be enormous bad publicity. And few people have realized it, but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust). But google thinks they're on to something here. Indeed, beta testers have reported that after a few days of using gmail they find it to be a whole new paradigm and don't want to go back to the folder based approach. So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground. Google's known for not releasing stuff until they're really sure they've ironed out the wrinkles.
You are horribly wrong. This is exactly the kind of confusion I was addressing with my original post. Corporations are entities with great (economic) powers (and relatively little responsibility, and certainly no eithics) that exist only because the law recognizes them. "Banning corporations" is soooo nonsensical because by default, corporations don't exist. They are far more than voluntary associations of people.
Corporations are the bedrock of capitalism. But there's no reason they are necessary in a free market.
Again, I'm not opposed to capitalism, just pointing out that vigilance is required, because it is very easy for power to be abused by corporations.
...is the problem with capitalism. The theory behind it is that when everyone chooses an optimally greedy strategy, society as a whole benefits. But you have cases like this where society clearly does not benefit, and countless hours of everyone's time are wasted. If the legal system were perfect, perhaps, then everything would be fine. But in practice it never is. My point is that people should be eternally vigilant rather than have blind faith in the system, which I perceive many Americans to have. And oh, another observation, don't confuse capitalism with the free market; the latter is unconditionally good, but the former is a double edged sword and needs a lot of checks and balances.
Naturally. If the product is intended to be cross platform right from the beginning, then the developers would prefer to work on linux and port it to windows rather than the other way round, so you can expect the linux version to be released slightly earlier. What is perhaps a little surprising is that they announced it before the Windows version was ready.
Why are these guys backstabbing each other? There's so much of the Windows and Unix market to take over even in the server space, and of course on the enterprise deskop is a huge market segment that linux has a decent shot at breaking through, so it would make a lot more sense and would be beneficial to both of them if they co-operated rather than fighting with each other.
A minor point, but its an example of the free market working as it should, rather than capitalism. They're not the same thing.
Its actually more than equal distribution of wealth. When jobs go to those who are able to perform them most efficiently, the economy as a whole improves. Therefore, in the long run, America benefits from outsourcing. Of course, the narrow segment of the workforce whose jobs are being outsourced loses, but overall its beneficial.
I find it a little funny that slashdotters are real quick to point out that the RIAA doesn't want to adapt to the changing market realities and has thus become obsolete, whereas all that they themselves will do is to complain, rather than adapt to the situation.
Ouch, this Vedic math thing has come up again. Unfortunately, the thing is a scam, and mathematicians who have looked into it have thoroughly denounced it. (That's a pdf file, and here's a shorter version). I'm not talking out of my ass either: I've studied it quite completely for a term paper I did a while back. Basically the guy is a fraud, and all his historical claims are BS, and the mental math tricks are quite bogus too: a lot of them are such obscure special cases as to be virtually useless, and most of the rest are just the standard arithmetic taught to kids with some minor modifications/simplifications couched in bombastic language in the hope that no one would notice that its really the same thing.
While 1GB is uber-cool and all that, it looks like gmail is not exactly a revolution in terms of usability and accessibility. Mark Pilgrim, of diveintomark.org, has a review of these aspects of gmail which he summarizes as "The target market for Gmail appears to be vi users who use Internet Explorer... The only way Gmail could be less accessible is if the entire site were built in Flash."
The thing to be a cross between web mail and a desktop email client: it is written in several hundred kilobytes of javascript.
CHAPEL HILL, NC--Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers--as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one."
According to Melinda Elkins, a coworker of Green's at The Frame Job, a Chapel Hill picture-frame shop, Green steers the conversation toward television whenever possible, just so he can mention not owning one.
"A few days ago, [store manager] Annette [Haig] was saying her new contacts were bothering her," Elkins said. "The second she said that, I knew Jonathan would pounce. He was like, 'I didn't know you had contacts, Annette. Are your eyes bad? That a shame. I'm really lucky to have almost perfect vision. I'm guessing it's because I don't watch TV. In fact, I don't even own one."
According to Elkins, "idiot box" is Green's favorite derogatory term for television.
"He uses that one a lot," she said. "But he's got other ones, too, like 'boob tube' and 'electronic babysitter.'"
Elkins said Green always makes sure to read the copies of Entertainment Weekly and People lying around the shop's break room, "just so he can point out all the stars and shows he's never heard of."
"Last week, in one of the magazines, there was a picture of Calista Flockhart," Elkins said, "and Jonathan announced, 'I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. Calista who? Am I supposed to have heard of her? I'm sorry, but I haven't.'"
Tony Gerela, who lives in the apartment directly below Green's and occasionally chats with the 37-year-old by the mailboxes, is well aware of his neighbor's disdain for television.
"About a week after I met him, we were talking, and I made some kind of Simpsons reference," Gerela said. "He asked me what I was talking about, and when I told him it was from a TV show, he just went off, saying how the last show he watched was some episode of Cheers, and even then, he could only watch for about two minutes before having to shut it off because it insulted his intelligence so terribly."
Added Gerela: "Once, I made the mistake of saying I saw something on the news, and he started in with, 'Saw the news? I don't know about you, but I read the news."
Green has lived without television since 1989, when his then-girlfriend moved out and took her set with her.
"When Claudia went, the TV went with her," Green said. "But instead of just going out and buying another one--which I certainly could have afforded, that wasn't the issue--I decided to stand up to the glass teat."
"I'm not an elitist," Green said. "It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."
"If I need a fix of passive audio-visual stimulation, I'll go to catch a Bergman or Truffaut film down at the university," Green said. "I certainly wouldn't waste my time watching the so-called Learning Channel or, God forbid, any of the mind sewage the major networks pump out."
Continued Green: "People don't realize just how much time their TV-watching habit--or, shall I say, addiction--eats up. Four hours of television a day, over the course of a month, adds up to 120 hours. That's five entire days! Why not spend that time living your own life, instead of watching fictional people live theirs? I can't begin to tell you how happy I am not to own a television."
Our neurons fire at 200 Hz. So if there was really a way to overclock our brains to today's CPU clock frequencies, we'd all become hyperintelligent (and pandimensional:-) beings. But then again, brain cells are 10^7-10^8 times as energy efficient as silicon chips. Yup, 10-100 million. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I guess.
I think the headline was supposed to be catchy and a little humorous. That's why they put the term in quotes. C'mon now, you appreciate a little bit of informality from companies, don't you?
Sorry, that won't work. Basic probability: even if it got hit by an asteroid, the chances that it had exactly the amount of momentum to slow down Sedna's angular velocity to near-zero would be infinitesimal. You could say that it's still not impossible, but then that's precisely what surprises astronomers: very-low-probability events. Of course such cosmic coindicences do happen, such as the moon's angular diameter being almost equal to the sun's when viewed from the earth, but far more often, it indicates a gap either in our observations or our theories.
The simplest rebuttal is that its not what you call it that matters but what you can do with it. And, judging by the ubiquitous deployment of linux clusters, the answer seems to be "almost anything under the sun".
Slashdot Mirror
Despite all recent negative publicity, Fedora is a great distro for the hobbyist desktop. I've been running FC1 since its release without any problems. I wish they'd stuck to 3 CDs though. IIRC, the 4th CD consists of lots of languages (and nothing else) so most people can skip it. Kernel 2.6, gnome 2.6, kde 3.2... can't wait.
welcome our new underwater robot overlords!
There weren't any "surprises given the last publicly viewable rankings". There are two sets of awards given out: the Webby award and the People's choice award. The former is decided by the academy and the latter by popular vote. The publicly viewable rankings are for the People's choice award. The nominated websites usually advertise it on their front page and get their readers to spam the people's choice vote, reducing it to a most-visited-site contest. Therefore, IMNSHO, the people's choice award is not very meaningful. For the Webby award itself there is no indication of who the winners are going to be before the final announcement.
from Macworld
Article with larger images (the site had the larger images separately in a tarball)...
http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/mirror/lin uxfs/piszcz_large.html
Not a clickable link to avoid hammering my poor server.
Being from an underdeveloped country myself, I find that due to the paucity of information, the first distro to get a foot in the door (Redhat) quickly acquires a monopoly. Have you observed the same thing?
You missed it because it broke just today.
...can be found here
Mozilla is starting the drive to firefox 1.0, and Ben Goodger (the firefox guy) is requesting that everyone report/nominate their most favorite bugs so that they have a better chance of getting fixed.
These guys must be prescient, they saw the slashdotting coming and demanded bandwidth in advance!
Of course they're not the same. What's your point? They're both client side web programming languages, and that's all that matters for my example.
They're playing for big stakes, and a lot of things have to go right. Since they're offering 1GB, and are doubtless counting on the user not being able to use up all of that immediately, their rate throttling measures had better be really good. If spammers/warez doodz find a way to exploit the system and automate the client interface, then google will probably have to retract their offer, which will be enormous bad publicity. And few people have realized it, but gmail is actually a whole desktop email app written in javascript. Several hundred KB of javascript. Or atleast a cross between webmail and a desktop app. Such attempts have never worked in the past. (I remember some horrors like html editors written in java on web hosting sites, before the dot.bust). But google thinks they're on to something here. Indeed, beta testers have reported that after a few days of using gmail they find it to be a whole new paradigm and don't want to go back to the folder based approach. So there's a lot of testing that google have to do, since they're breaking new ground. Google's known for not releasing stuff until they're really sure they've ironed out the wrinkles.
Corporations are the bedrock of capitalism. But there's no reason they are necessary in a free market.
Again, I'm not opposed to capitalism, just pointing out that vigilance is required, because it is very easy for power to be abused by corporations.
I don't deny it. I'm not opposed to capitalism. But as I said in my original post, we have to be eternally vigilant.
...is the problem with capitalism. The theory behind it is that when everyone chooses an optimally greedy strategy, society as a whole benefits. But you have cases like this where society clearly does not benefit, and countless hours of everyone's time are wasted. If the legal system were perfect, perhaps, then everything would be fine. But in practice it never is. My point is that people should be eternally vigilant rather than have blind faith in the system, which I perceive many Americans to have. And oh, another observation, don't confuse capitalism with the free market; the latter is unconditionally good, but the former is a double edged sword and needs a lot of checks and balances.
Naturally. If the product is intended to be cross platform right from the beginning, then the developers would prefer to work on linux and port it to windows rather than the other way round, so you can expect the linux version to be released slightly earlier. What is perhaps a little surprising is that they announced it before the Windows version was ready.
Why are these guys backstabbing each other? There's so much of the Windows and Unix market to take over even in the server space, and of course on the enterprise deskop is a huge market segment that linux has a decent shot at breaking through, so it would make a lot more sense and would be beneficial to both of them if they co-operated rather than fighting with each other.
Its actually more than equal distribution of wealth. When jobs go to those who are able to perform them most efficiently, the economy as a whole improves. Therefore, in the long run, America benefits from outsourcing. Of course, the narrow segment of the workforce whose jobs are being outsourced loses, but overall its beneficial.
I find it a little funny that slashdotters are real quick to point out that the RIAA doesn't want to adapt to the changing market realities and has thus become obsolete, whereas all that they themselves will do is to complain, rather than adapt to the situation.
Ouch, this Vedic math thing has come up again. Unfortunately, the thing is a scam, and mathematicians who have looked into it have thoroughly denounced it. (That's a pdf file, and here's a shorter version). I'm not talking out of my ass either: I've studied it quite completely for a term paper I did a while back. Basically the guy is a fraud, and all his historical claims are BS, and the mental math tricks are quite bogus too: a lot of them are such obscure special cases as to be virtually useless, and most of the rest are just the standard arithmetic taught to kids with some minor modifications/simplifications couched in bombastic language in the hope that no one would notice that its really the same thing.
The thing to be a cross between web mail and a desktop email client: it is written in several hundred kilobytes of javascript.
CHAPEL HILL, NC--Area resident Jonathan Green does not own a television, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkers--as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
v ision.html
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television," Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted TV. "I don't even own one."
According to Melinda Elkins, a coworker of Green's at The Frame Job, a Chapel Hill picture-frame shop, Green steers the conversation toward television whenever possible, just so he can mention not owning one.
"A few days ago, [store manager] Annette [Haig] was saying her new contacts were bothering her," Elkins said. "The second she said that, I knew Jonathan would pounce. He was like, 'I didn't know you had contacts, Annette. Are your eyes bad? That a shame. I'm really lucky to have almost perfect vision. I'm guessing it's because I don't watch TV. In fact, I don't even own one."
According to Elkins, "idiot box" is Green's favorite derogatory term for television.
"He uses that one a lot," she said. "But he's got other ones, too, like 'boob tube' and 'electronic babysitter.'"
Elkins said Green always makes sure to read the copies of Entertainment Weekly and People lying around the shop's break room, "just so he can point out all the stars and shows he's never heard of."
"Last week, in one of the magazines, there was a picture of Calista Flockhart," Elkins said, "and Jonathan announced, 'I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. Calista who? Am I supposed to have heard of her? I'm sorry, but I haven't.'"
Tony Gerela, who lives in the apartment directly below Green's and occasionally chats with the 37-year-old by the mailboxes, is well aware of his neighbor's disdain for television.
"About a week after I met him, we were talking, and I made some kind of Simpsons reference," Gerela said. "He asked me what I was talking about, and when I told him it was from a TV show, he just went off, saying how the last show he watched was some episode of Cheers, and even then, he could only watch for about two minutes before having to shut it off because it insulted his intelligence so terribly."
Added Gerela: "Once, I made the mistake of saying I saw something on the news, and he started in with, 'Saw the news? I don't know about you, but I read the news."
Green has lived without television since 1989, when his then-girlfriend moved out and took her set with her.
"When Claudia went, the TV went with her," Green said. "But instead of just going out and buying another one--which I certainly could have afforded, that wasn't the issue--I decided to stand up to the glass teat."
"I'm not an elitist," Green said. "It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."
"If I need a fix of passive audio-visual stimulation, I'll go to catch a Bergman or Truffaut film down at the university," Green said. "I certainly wouldn't waste my time watching the so-called Learning Channel or, God forbid, any of the mind sewage the major networks pump out."
Continued Green: "People don't realize just how much time their TV-watching habit--or, shall I say, addiction--eats up. Four hours of television a day, over the course of a month, adds up to 120 hours. That's five entire days! Why not spend that time living your own life, instead of watching fictional people live theirs? I can't begin to tell you how happy I am not to own a television."
Source: http://www.theonion.com/onion3604/doesnt_own_tele
Our neurons fire at 200 Hz. So if there was really a way to overclock our brains to today's CPU clock frequencies, we'd all become hyperintelligent (and pandimensional :-) beings. But then again, brain cells are 10^7-10^8 times as energy efficient as silicon chips. Yup, 10-100 million. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I guess.
I think the headline was supposed to be catchy and a little humorous. That's why they put the term in quotes. C'mon now, you appreciate a little bit of informality from companies, don't you?
Sorry, that won't work. Basic probability: even if it got hit by an asteroid, the chances that it had exactly the amount of momentum to slow down Sedna's angular velocity to near-zero would be infinitesimal. You could say that it's still not impossible, but then that's precisely what surprises astronomers: very-low-probability events. Of course such cosmic coindicences do happen, such as the moon's angular diameter being almost equal to the sun's when viewed from the earth, but far more often, it indicates a gap either in our observations or our theories.
The simplest rebuttal is that its not what you call it that matters but what you can do with it. And, judging by the ubiquitous deployment of linux clusters, the answer seems to be "almost anything under the sun".