This is funny... Because a few days ago Quebec announced that it had decided to follow the US and that the gov of Qc was trying to convince Ontario and New Brunswick (that are also in EST). Radio-canada reported it (in French)
I'm sorry, I am all for open source and think it should be promoted. But if the breathalyzer's accuracy has been tested and verified, not being open source should not be a reason to let a drunk driver off the hook, in my opinion.
I'm all for Free Software too.. and I also dont think the drunk driver should be let off the hook. That's why the source code has to be released.. Its not as if it was complex software.. and I mean.. they are selling a machine. Its not like asking Microsoft to Free Windows.. it wont kill the company.. But will probably guarantee a fair trial.. And it creates a good precedent for voting machines, etc.
Apple has finally abandonned Firewire... For the first time, no shipping iPod supports Firewire. Lets remember that the original iPod (which I still own) only supported firewire and did not have the special dock connector but a regular firewire socket on it. Seems like Apple has thrown in the towel. Its interesting to note that the new iMac G5 does not have firewire 800 either. And even the powermac has a single firewire 800 port (and 2 x 400)...
Interesting... hparker is a gentoo dev.... I didn't know he worked for Gen-ux too..
The person who "signed" the press release is also the lead of "Gentoo developer relations" aka devrel, the Gentoo HR department.
I'm still trying to find out who else from Gentoo is involved in that thing.. but I can tell you from the internal mailing list that I'm clearly not the only one to be surprised.
Disclaimer: I'm also a Gentoo Dev... and I didnt know about this before reading about it on slashdot..
So how does this differ from http://forums.gentoo.org/ and irc://irc.freenode.net/gentoo (I don't think/. wants me to linkify it...)?
I think the difference is that you get an answer from a developer.. while on the Forum or on #gentoo @ freenode you will get an answer from a nobody.. because very few developers frequent them nowadays.. since there are way too many looser in there.
Using the layout as slashcode, it seems that the font is specified to be Serif everywhere... I much prefer to read on-screen stuff with a sans font, which is my default. Please dont specify the font and just use my browser's default... Please remove "font-family: serif;" from the body{}
I would agree with the text file... I spent my whole parallel algorithms class taking notes in GNU emacs (which is a much better editor than vi).
But those note taking apps are useful only if you dont have graphics or maths.. otherwise it becomes hell.. I still haven't seen a single good one for that.. during my first year in engineering school I wanted to try writing one.. but I never found the good idea/motivation...
OK, I like bashing Microsoft just as much as the next guy. But I just skimmed through the application and they're not simply trying to patent "displaying numbers in a box." The application is for dynamically highlighting (or whatever) all numeric elements within a document, even if the numerics are expressed in words (e.g., "one thousand") in any supported language. While possibly of limited use, this does seem to be a unique feature.
Actually, you are misreading the patent. In a US patent, each claim stands on its own. If only have to reproduce one of them to infringe on the patent.
And claim 1 is: A method for emphasizing numerical data contained in an electronic document, the method comprising: determining whether a request to emphasize all of the numerical data in the electronic document has been received; and in response to receiving the request, locating all of the numerical data contained within the electronic document and emphasizing the located numerical data.
your with Bell Sympatico too I guess?;) (I'm in Montreal too)
How do we get such good rates? One word, government regulations. Bell (our ex-phone monopoly) has to rent the lines for 7 $CAD/month to their competitors (for DSL). They dont get to pick the price.
Oh and on top of that, for a few years they had a price war with the cable company. Also helped by proper regulation..
offtopic: anyone know how to stop windows from swapping when there is 500mb+ of free ram? it's really annoying, and just putting the swap to 0 on all drives doesn't really solve the problem either(and some soft freak off from it, this is on XP). I hate having 1.5gb of ram and only seeing half of it used regularly while having windows swap horrendously.
You ough to know that 500megs of ram is enough for everyone.
My school (the École Polytechnique de Montréal) only has one Sun Solaris lab left (for some electrical eng. app that is only available on old Unix). They moved all of their others labs to Linux years ago (like 5-8 years). They used to run Slackware and have really bad default desktop.. but they've since moved to Fedora and it works pretty well. Most Software/Computer engineering labs are done on Linux too, very few on Windows. Btw, I'm graduating as a Software Eng. from there during the summer!
pvd is not only known for the MacOS-X mess (when he brough in a bunch of unexperienced and mostly incompetent developers), but also for the basc problems (which is a statistics client for some website... but was full of security problems and is a never ending source of policy breakage)...
At least, OpenSolaris is Open Source software unlike MacOS-X (There is also a Gentoo/Darwin project... but no one is taking it seriously).
What they need is a union so they can demand better working condition.. And that would prevent EA from firing everyong (except if they move to china or india)..
Give everyone a GUID, a complete random key of sufficient length that you can't simply guess and get a valid GUID. Mail it to them.
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
The problem with this is that people could easily sell their vote. And then the buyer could check with the GUID..
I still believe that the only good way to vote is with hand counted paper ballots... With very strict and precise rules on what is or is not a valid vote.
But anyways, americans should be barred from voting.. I could write an auto-voter.. just tell it how many voters in a precinct, and it will elect the right person (of my choosing)..
I think you are making the mistake of equating Quebec and Montreal.... Montrealers drive like crazy.. but people outside Mtl (like in Quebec City) drive reasonably....
The real question is... Is any distribution going to include XFree 4.4 ? What are the other major distributions like Suse saying about it? Seems like no one is going to be using Xfree 4.4... And the XFree86 people are going to think seriously about changing back their license...
I'm not surprised at all that Videotron would support that. They are owned by Quebec's biggest (only big) media conglomerate, Quebecor.. Which is also the world's largest printer (Quebecor World), but that's pretty separate from Quebecor Media...
So Quebecor media also owns, appart from Videotron (cable), the biggest TV network (TVA), the most read newspapers (Le journal de Montreal and Le journal de Quebec), quite a few magasines and more importantly in this case, Musicor.. a record label.. They are not well known outside Quebec though, because all of their media are in French... but they are THE dominant player in Quebec...
That's bizzare, the benchmarks that we did before porting Gentoo showed that the Opterons were actually faster in 64bit mode than in 32bit.. I attribute this to the presence of twice as many generic registers..
I've repaced my TI-83+ with a Dell Inspiron and I'm not going back. Even if I admit that the Dell is a little bulkier, its so much more powerful. It can do symbolic solving of complex integrals, etc. I dont see why people are buying those programmable calculators. Especially considering that I have to use a non-programmable one in exams at school anyways.
Re:Here's another ancient one that DOES impact you
on
Oldest Supported Software?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I went to an interesting conference by a guy named Phillipe Krouchten from Rational (or should I say IBM Rational now?) who was heading their Vancouver division studying software engineering stuff. From my understanding he is the father of the RUP (Rational Unified Process).
Canada basicly had the same problem as the US with an aging air traffic control system and basicly at the same time they started doing mostly the same thing. And a few years later they discovered that they where not advancing much, so they called in that guy who at the time worked as a consultant and he is supposed to have basicly turned aroudn the whole project and completed it..
Anyways, the interesing point of his conference was on iterative VS waterfall processes. At first everyone though that the "waterfall" approach was right. First write a good specification, then code, then test, then release.. But it was discovered that it didnt work. So Kruchten basicly transformed the project to use iterative techniques were they would go over 3 months of specify, code, test, and they do it again until the project was completed...
The part that I dont understand was... Why arent americans buying the Canadian system?
A long time ago.. (6-7 years ago)... Unlimited meant for me "unlimited time on the phone", before broadband and I had a one year contract with my isp at the time.. At the end of the year, the guy basicly told me I was hogging his modem all the time (which wasnt entirely false..). So I just went to another ISP.. and that was it.. he lost a client, too bad for him...
Another little story, at my school we have places where we can plug in our laptop and have a login on to the network.. and they'd email us when we go over 500megs/day.. This is not in a dorm or something, I mean downloading 500 megs/day in a "public" place.. school cafeteria and some classes.. And that's only downloading from outside the school network, so it doesnt count Linux distribution isos and other stuff for which we have a local mirror.. And I know quite a few people (big kazaa users) who received the email everyday for the whole year and there never was any sanction.. But I know that someone looked over those logs because one day I downloaded debian/sparc isos and I got an email from a sysadmin telling me he had a local mirror of deb, but he hadnt noticed I was downloading the sparc edition;)....
Slashdot Mirror
This is funny... Because a few days ago Quebec announced that it had decided to follow the US and that the gov of Qc was trying to convince Ontario and New Brunswick (that are also in EST). Radio-canada reported it (in French)
I'm all for Free Software too.. and I also dont think the drunk driver should be let off the hook. That's why the source code has to be released.. Its not as if it was complex software.. and I mean.. they are selling a machine. Its not like asking Microsoft to Free Windows .. it wont kill the company.. But will probably guarantee a fair trial.. And it creates a good precedent for voting machines, etc.
Apple has finally abandonned Firewire...
For the first time, no shipping iPod supports Firewire. Lets remember that the original iPod (which I still own) only supported firewire and did not have the special dock connector but a regular firewire socket on it. Seems like Apple has thrown in the towel. Its interesting to note that the new iMac G5 does not have firewire 800 either. And even the powermac has a single firewire 800 port (and 2 x 400)...
Seems like eradicator also worked from them at some point..
Interesting... hparker is a gentoo dev.... I didn't know he worked for Gen-ux too..
The person who "signed" the press release is also the lead of "Gentoo developer relations" aka devrel, the Gentoo HR department.
I'm still trying to find out who else from Gentoo is involved in that thing.. but I can tell you from the internal mailing list that I'm clearly not the only one to be surprised.
Disclaimer: I'm also a Gentoo Dev... and I didnt know about this before reading about it on slashdot..
I think the difference is that you get an answer from a developer.. while on the Forum or on #gentoo @ freenode you will get an answer from a nobody.. because very few developers frequent them nowadays.. since there are way too many looser in there.
Using the layout as slashcode, it seems that the font is specified to be Serif everywhere... I much prefer to read on-screen stuff with a sans font, which is my default. Please dont specify the font and just use my browser's default... Please remove "font-family: serif;" from the body{}
Thank you,
Tester
arrrgg.. I'm getting a 405 too.. with both of my gmail accounts... Well I guess I'll try later
I would agree with the text file... I spent my whole parallel algorithms class taking notes in GNU emacs (which is a much better editor than vi).
But those note taking apps are useful only if you dont have graphics or maths.. otherwise it becomes hell.. I still haven't seen a single good one for that.. during my first year in engineering school I wanted to try writing one.. but I never found the good idea/motivation...
Actually, you are misreading the patent. In a US patent, each claim stands on its own. If only have to reproduce one of them to infringe on the patent.
And claim 1 is: A method for emphasizing numerical data contained in an electronic document, the method comprising: determining whether a request to emphasize all of the numerical data in the electronic document has been received; and in response to receiving the request, locating all of the numerical data contained within the electronic document and emphasizing the located numerical data.
This is really as ridiculous as we beleive..
your with Bell Sympatico too I guess? ;) (I'm in Montreal too)
How do we get such good rates? One word, government regulations. Bell (our ex-phone monopoly) has to rent the lines for 7 $CAD/month to their competitors (for DSL). They dont get to pick the price.
Oh and on top of that, for a few years they had a price war with the cable company. Also helped by proper regulation..
You ough to know that 500megs of ram is enough for everyone.
My school (the École Polytechnique de Montréal) only has one Sun Solaris lab left (for some electrical eng. app that is only available on old Unix). They moved all of their others labs to Linux years ago (like 5-8 years). They used to run Slackware and have really bad default desktop.. but they've since moved to Fedora and it works pretty well. Most Software/Computer engineering labs are done on Linux too, very few on Windows. Btw, I'm graduating as a Software Eng. from there during the summer!
pvd is not only known for the MacOS-X mess (when he brough in a bunch of unexperienced and mostly incompetent developers), but also for the basc problems (which is a statistics client for some website... but was full of security problems and is a never ending source of policy breakage)...
At least, OpenSolaris is Open Source software unlike MacOS-X (There is also a Gentoo/Darwin project... but no one is taking it seriously).
What they need is a union so they can demand better working condition.. And that would prevent EA from firing everyong (except if they move to china or india)..
When a person votes, their vote is stored against their GUID, in a publically accessable database. Anyone can check that their vote has been correctly counted by looking up their GUID in the table.
The problem with this is that people could easily sell their vote. And then the buyer could check with the GUID.. I still believe that the only good way to vote is with hand counted paper ballots... With very strict and precise rules on what is or is not a valid vote.
But anyways, americans should be barred from voting.. I could write an auto-voter.. just tell it how many voters in a precinct, and it will elect the right person (of my choosing)..
I guess you don't live in Quebec, then?
I think you are making the mistake of equating Quebec and Montreal.... Montrealers drive like crazy.. but people outside Mtl (like in Quebec City) drive reasonably....The real question is... Is any distribution going to include XFree 4.4 ? What are the other major distributions like Suse saying about it? Seems like no one is going to be using Xfree 4.4... And the XFree86 people are going to think seriously about changing back their license...
Why doesn't it surprise me that videotron is willing to roll over? Videotron is a Quebec based company.
Typical French, "We surrender!"/
Maybe its because they are owned by a huge media conglomerate that's also has music label?
I'm not surprised at all that Videotron would support that. They are owned by Quebec's biggest (only big) media conglomerate, Quebecor.. Which is also the world's largest printer (Quebecor World), but that's pretty separate from Quebecor Media...
So Quebecor media also owns, appart from Videotron (cable), the biggest TV network (TVA), the most read newspapers (Le journal de Montreal and Le journal de Quebec), quite a few magasines and more importantly in this case, Musicor.. a record label.. They are not well known outside Quebec though, because all of their media are in French... but they are THE dominant player in Quebec...
That's bizzare, the benchmarks that we did before porting Gentoo showed that the Opterons were actually faster in 64bit mode than in 32bit.. I attribute this to the presence of twice as many generic registers..
Actually, this is not true! From Microsoft's latest SEC filings, it has a $US 52 billion dollar reserve.. 100 million would be avout 0.2% of that...
I've repaced my TI-83+ with a Dell Inspiron and I'm not going back. Even if I admit that the Dell is a little bulkier, its so much more powerful. It can do symbolic solving of complex integrals, etc. I dont see why people are buying those programmable calculators. Especially considering that I have to use a non-programmable one in exams at school anyways.
I went to an interesting conference by a guy named Phillipe Krouchten from Rational (or should I say IBM Rational now?) who was heading their Vancouver division studying software engineering stuff. From my understanding he is the father of the RUP (Rational Unified Process).
Canada basicly had the same problem as the US with an aging air traffic control system and basicly at the same time they started doing mostly the same thing. And a few years later they discovered that they where not advancing much, so they called in that guy who at the time worked as a consultant and he is supposed to have basicly turned aroudn the whole project and completed it..
Anyways, the interesing point of his conference was on iterative VS waterfall processes. At first everyone though that the "waterfall" approach was right. First write a good specification, then code, then test, then release.. But it was discovered that it didnt work. So Kruchten basicly transformed the project to use iterative techniques were they would go over 3 months of specify, code, test, and they do it again until the project was completed...
The part that I dont understand was... Why arent americans buying the Canadian system?
A long time ago.. (6-7 years ago)... Unlimited meant for me "unlimited time on the phone", before broadband and I had a one year contract with my isp at the time.. At the end of the year, the guy basicly told me I was hogging his modem all the time (which wasnt entirely false..). So I just went to another ISP.. and that was it.. he lost a client, too bad for him...
;) ....
;)
Another little story, at my school we have places where we can plug in our laptop and have a login on to the network.. and they'd email us when we go over 500megs/day.. This is not in a dorm or something, I mean downloading 500 megs/day in a "public" place.. school cafeteria and some classes.. And that's only downloading from outside the school network, so it doesnt count Linux distribution isos and other stuff for which we have a local mirror.. And I know quite a few people (big kazaa users) who received the email everyday for the whole year and there never was any sanction.. But I know that someone looked over those logs because one day I downloaded debian/sparc isos and I got an email from a sysadmin telling me he had a local mirror of deb, but he hadnt noticed I was downloading the sparc edition
This comment is boring.. sorry..