Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate. When you consider the fact that it's hard to get a few Slashdot engineers to agree on a single issue, you should know it takes a ton of skills for someone to pull the board, the investors, marketing, engineering, accounting, etc. together and have them actually do work.
If Linux wants to win, make it easier to use and develop on than an iPhone, without Apple's kind of closed walled garden. Make it more pervasive than HTML5/JavaScript/CSS without all the mess with browser incompatibilities. Trying to compare Linux to the dead last OS-to-go (fact: Windows' market share has been declining, on both desktop and mobile - especially mobile) in the consumer market is already a sign of weakness in the FOSS space.
And even your first point is flawed. You can almost always say all these are a fault of the Linux software stack. Mac OS X doesn't have all the drivers for all hardware either - but I find Hackintosh on the appropriate hardware a much more enjoyable experience than using Linux for the everyday desktop. The thing is, Hackintosh is very much a work/not work thing - after you've hacked your Realtek audio driver or nVidia video driver (e.g. via EFI string, from Chameleon, or the older injectors), it simply works like a real Mac. Linux? Even if you've got the right driver (and what is the right driver? e.g. if you have an nVidia card, there's nVidia's driver, nouveau, and is Gallium3D one of those too? oh, and vesa "works" too - your distro might have selected that and you may never know unless you checked xorg.conf...), you're still likely to have a ton of other problems with this and that layers of middleware.
Skype rules the Internet telephony space - that's a fact. Why hasn't there been an open source video conferencing package that beats it in terms of market penetration? That is a weakness on FOSS's side. It is definitely possible to beat Skype, just as Firefox is beating out IE in some European countries. Yelling at me for using proprietary software is just ignoring the problem.
And why are you assuming I'm not an open source contributor automatically? It's quite stupid to try that trick on Slashdot, any random guy here may be ranked 10 on Ohloh or is a CTO of some billion dollar tech company.
PDF is an open standard, and I'm referring to Apple's Preview application there - it comes with every Mac, it does everything that I need from Adobe Acrobat Pro, and it doesn't suck.
By modern game I mean games that have native ports for Linux, that aren't esoteric games like Tux Racer. e.g. if you download Quake 3 Arena's demo for Linux and install it to a Ubuntu 10 today, you follow the instructions.. and it doesn't even install. Doing the same on Windows 7 simply works. Quake 4 also has a native client for Linux, but again it's a pain in the ass to get it to work - SDL? OSS? OpenAL? ALSA? Pulse? Why do I need to care about all these just to have sound? I'm not saying this because I don't know how to do it - I've done it before. But compare that to Mac OS X's drag-and-drop install, or iPhone's buy from App Store kind of easiness, they're a universe apart.
Video conferencing is not limited to Skype - there's Ekiga. But two points... First, if you're only using Ekiga, you're still likely to have major problems with your webcam's driver. There're still a ton of webcams that are not supported under Linux. Second... who cares about Skype being proprietary if every business contact you have is using Skype for video conference?
Your last sentence about me is simply tasteless. You're basically putting up a strawman in place of me and you're attacking some imaginary being.
SCM, bug trackers are just little details. You can always explain them to students in a traditional lecture.
The real difference between open source and traditional education is the motivation. The usual college class pits you against a number of classmates - if you made a mistake in an exam, you're less likely to get the A+. Unless you're one of the lucky few who can easily breeze through exams and tests, it's a negative reinforcement cycle.
Nobody gives you a grade in open source software development. You make something, or help making something, and people use it. You feel happier and you're naturally motivated by your users to improve your coding skills to make your next release better. That's a positive reinforcement cycle (usually), and I think it's much easier to get people to become good at coding and project management like that.
No. Try anything a bit more complicated than using Chrome or Firefox - e.g. installing and playing a modern game on it, video conferencing, audio and video input on Flash, adding notes and annotations to a.pdf, etc. And you'll be in a ton of pain.
I don't think you can hire an H1-B for $30k. I work in Palo Alto and the H1-B job postings in the office, even for entry level programmers, are on the range of $70k+.
The article mentioned that it's a direct conversion from skin to blood... but I think a reasonable patch of skin wouldn't have enough volume of cells for a blood transfusion?
I hope his guy well. But there's gotta be somebody who thought up the idea of sending him a cease and desist letter just for the fun of it - or extracting a few thousand dollars from him.
I'm working in office right now so I'm not sure if I can contribute enough time to make a web crawler for this, and I'm surely not leaving for Starbucks in these few hours... but we can do this in Python...
My basic idea is this... someone can be installing this crawler package into Python, write an event handler for each crawled URL from the crawler and ask the crawler to continue only for URLs inside the site's domain - which is simply a regex check.
That should be less than 50 lines of code. Someone write it, test it, and let's go to Starbucks and party tonight.
No. Have you ever went to Hong Kong? McDonald's is junk food in Hong Kong. They pretty much have the same health problems as in any other first world places (e.g. obesity in kids, heart diseases, diabetes, etc.)
Get him to play a mod-able game with you, and challenge him (or cooperate with him) to write a module. Make it good and popular so he can impress his friends. Once he appreciates the power of being able to create something from nothing, he'll never go back. Language or algorithm doesn't matter.
Not really... 686 N is the scientifically correct way the state something's weight. If you happen to be in an elevator and the elevator accelerates up or down, your weight would change. If you're sitting in a plane and it's taking off or landing, your weight would change too. Your mass in kg, however, wouldn't change. You're still 68kg even though you weigh far less than 680 N on the Moon.
Well, unfortunately, that plain text thing isn't limited to the hack. I intercepted the traffic coming from their iPhone app and it sends your passwords in plain text too.
I did a simple Wireshark session with Foursquare's iPhone app and found they're sending my username and password in plain text over HTTP - they don't encrypt anything at all and they do it every time you open the Foursquare app.
You can see the Wireshark screenshot at my :
blog post.
I'm removing the Foursquare app from my iPhone now. It's way too dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate. When you consider the fact that it's hard to get a few Slashdot engineers to agree on a single issue, you should know it takes a ton of skills for someone to pull the board, the investors, marketing, engineering, accounting, etc. together and have them actually do work.
If we use and instead of && our secretary will understand how to code and we'll save milions!
Watch out for when your secretary learns to fly, then - for she's coding in Python and she's gonna import antigravity!
But there's no information proving that a coder in-the-know can't turn the DEP-inactive exploit into a DEP-active exploit.
If Linux wants to win, make it easier to use and develop on than an iPhone, without Apple's kind of closed walled garden. Make it more pervasive than HTML5/JavaScript/CSS without all the mess with browser incompatibilities. Trying to compare Linux to the dead last OS-to-go (fact: Windows' market share has been declining, on both desktop and mobile - especially mobile) in the consumer market is already a sign of weakness in the FOSS space.
And even your first point is flawed. You can almost always say all these are a fault of the Linux software stack. Mac OS X doesn't have all the drivers for all hardware either - but I find Hackintosh on the appropriate hardware a much more enjoyable experience than using Linux for the everyday desktop. The thing is, Hackintosh is very much a work/not work thing - after you've hacked your Realtek audio driver or nVidia video driver (e.g. via EFI string, from Chameleon, or the older injectors), it simply works like a real Mac. Linux? Even if you've got the right driver (and what is the right driver? e.g. if you have an nVidia card, there's nVidia's driver, nouveau, and is Gallium3D one of those too? oh, and vesa "works" too - your distro might have selected that and you may never know unless you checked xorg.conf...), you're still likely to have a ton of other problems with this and that layers of middleware.
Skype rules the Internet telephony space - that's a fact. Why hasn't there been an open source video conferencing package that beats it in terms of market penetration? That is a weakness on FOSS's side. It is definitely possible to beat Skype, just as Firefox is beating out IE in some European countries. Yelling at me for using proprietary software is just ignoring the problem.
And why are you assuming I'm not an open source contributor automatically? It's quite stupid to try that trick on Slashdot, any random guy here may be ranked 10 on Ohloh or is a CTO of some billion dollar tech company.
PDF is an open standard, and I'm referring to Apple's Preview application there - it comes with every Mac, it does everything that I need from Adobe Acrobat Pro, and it doesn't suck.
By modern game I mean games that have native ports for Linux, that aren't esoteric games like Tux Racer. e.g. if you download Quake 3 Arena's demo for Linux and install it to a Ubuntu 10 today, you follow the instructions.. and it doesn't even install. Doing the same on Windows 7 simply works. Quake 4 also has a native client for Linux, but again it's a pain in the ass to get it to work - SDL? OSS? OpenAL? ALSA? Pulse? Why do I need to care about all these just to have sound? I'm not saying this because I don't know how to do it - I've done it before. But compare that to Mac OS X's drag-and-drop install, or iPhone's buy from App Store kind of easiness, they're a universe apart.
Video conferencing is not limited to Skype - there's Ekiga. But two points... First, if you're only using Ekiga, you're still likely to have major problems with your webcam's driver. There're still a ton of webcams that are not supported under Linux. Second... who cares about Skype being proprietary if every business contact you have is using Skype for video conference?
Your last sentence about me is simply tasteless. You're basically putting up a strawman in place of me and you're attacking some imaginary being.
SCM, bug trackers are just little details. You can always explain them to students in a traditional lecture.
The real difference between open source and traditional education is the motivation. The usual college class pits you against a number of classmates - if you made a mistake in an exam, you're less likely to get the A+. Unless you're one of the lucky few who can easily breeze through exams and tests, it's a negative reinforcement cycle.
Nobody gives you a grade in open source software development. You make something, or help making something, and people use it. You feel happier and you're naturally motivated by your users to improve your coding skills to make your next release better. That's a positive reinforcement cycle (usually), and I think it's much easier to get people to become good at coding and project management like that.
No. Try anything a bit more complicated than using Chrome or Firefox - e.g. installing and playing a modern game on it, video conferencing, audio and video input on Flash, adding notes and annotations to a .pdf, etc. And you'll be in a ton of pain.
I don't think you can hire an H1-B for $30k. I work in Palo Alto and the H1-B job postings in the office, even for entry level programmers, are on the range of $70k+.
The article mentioned that it's a direct conversion from skin to blood... but I think a reasonable patch of skin wouldn't have enough volume of cells for a blood transfusion?
Divide it by the US's population, that's a bit more than $300 for each person... you can eat a nice meal with that but it's not a lot.
In that case, I'd choose science.
Had he not posted the action on his blog, it'd have been hard.
I hope his guy well. But there's gotta be somebody who thought up the idea of sending him a cease and desist letter just for the fun of it - or extracting a few thousand dollars from him.
Good answer, wasn't aware wget could do that. So it's just this...
$ while true; do wget --mirror --delete-after http://www.northcountrygazette.org/; done
You can pretty much do this in a jailbroken iPhone with wget installed, sipping coffee leisurely in a Starbucks.
I'm working in office right now so I'm not sure if I can contribute enough time to make a web crawler for this, and I'm surely not leaving for Starbucks in these few hours... but we can do this in Python...
http://code.google.com/p/harvestman-crawler/wiki/WritingCustomCrawlers
My basic idea is this... someone can be installing this crawler package into Python, write an event handler for each crawled URL from the crawler and ask the crawler to continue only for URLs inside the site's domain - which is simply a regex check.
That should be less than 50 lines of code. Someone write it, test it, and let's go to Starbucks and party tonight.
I think you're doing your maths wrong. It's tenths of people will subscribe to them.
Too bad the site is down right now.
I'm sure you're infringing on my patent on a device that consumes electricity and sends or receives wireless signals.
No. Have you ever went to Hong Kong? McDonald's is junk food in Hong Kong. They pretty much have the same health problems as in any other first world places (e.g. obesity in kids, heart diseases, diabetes, etc.)
It links to Facebook's "wrong browser" page. The real link may be here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=631826881803
Worse, it's now found on Slashdot.
If he needs to be taught, he isn't good.
Get him to play a mod-able game with you, and challenge him (or cooperate with him) to write a module. Make it good and popular so he can impress his friends. Once he appreciates the power of being able to create something from nothing, he'll never go back. Language or algorithm doesn't matter.
Not really... 686 N is the scientifically correct way the state something's weight. If you happen to be in an elevator and the elevator accelerates up or down, your weight would change. If you're sitting in a plane and it's taking off or landing, your weight would change too. Your mass in kg, however, wouldn't change. You're still 68kg even though you weigh far less than 680 N on the Moon.
If you're still unsatisfied, just ask Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight
Well, unfortunately, that plain text thing isn't limited to the hack. I intercepted the traffic coming from their iPhone app and it sends your passwords in plain text too.
I did a simple Wireshark session with Foursquare's iPhone app and found they're sending my username and password in plain text over HTTP - they don't encrypt anything at all and they do it every time you open the Foursquare app.
You can see the Wireshark screenshot at my : blog post.
I'm removing the Foursquare app from my iPhone now. It's way too dangerous.