It amazes me that so many reputable people and organisations have fallen for the ridiculous myth that there is some sort of Finnish student who has single-handedly created something that threatens to overthrow the current software distribution system as we know it. I find it particularly absurd that he is lauded as some sort of super overlord throughout hackerdom. Even generally reliablesources have fallen for this ridiculous scam. The concept that one youth from Central Europe could sow the seed for an operating system which frightens Microsoft is risible at best. It has taken Microsoft a decade to produce an OS which is even reasonably reliable and stands alone. So what makes you think that in the short time span from 1991 to the present day that a fictional character could produce an operating system which is more stable than Windows?
Obviously, this "Linus Torvalds" must be some sort of superhuman to have done such a thing. But we all know that there is no such thing as a superhuman. As such it must be plain for all to see that this "Linus Torvalds" is some sort of fabrication. It is the only way to explain why Linus keeps such a low profile, and that the main bit of evidence to even suggest his existence is the testimony of his mother and the strange posts "he" makes on obscure message boards. The fact that an entire community of "warez doods" has sprung up, proclaiming that "LUNIX RULEZZZ" is such a flimsy piece of evidence it must be discounted. But if "Linus Torvalds" does not actually exist, then who has conjured up his existence? There is only one possible person who could get away with such a fraud. Mikke Torvalds, "his" supposed birth parent.
Mrs. Torvalds may have a lot to say about her son, but this does not excuse the fact that he does not exist. When you consider this, is it genuinely surprising that she found him "easy to raise"? Of course, there is one immediate objection which will no doubt be raised. "If Linus Torvalds doesn't really exist," I hear you ask, "then who wrote Linux?" That is a good question, but it is very obvious to see who. If you take a look around here for a while, you will hear names like Alan Cox, Richard Stallman, and Eric Raymond being bandied about. Obviously, it is immensely skilled coders and hackers such as these people who have made the wonderful OS Linux what it is today. The person who first made that post on comp.os.minix was in fact Linus' mother, who, frustrated by the ludicrous restrictions imposed upon her by Minix, posted a message under a partial pseudonym, asking for help building a new operating system. All she wanted was someone to help her use her PC to print out her recipes, but before she knew it she was in way over her head. Pretty soon Linux had hit 1.0 and strangers like Tanenbaum were talking about and cussing it.
Fortunately, Mikke had released the kernel under the GPL from the start, so she was able to dump it onto the shoulders of other people without arousing too much suspicion. Now she only has to make periodic appearances on Usenet and the like to avoid arousing the interest of news-hungry geeks and ZDNet reporters. "But what about the conferences?" you cry. "We have photographic evidence!" Well, that isn't Linus. Are you sure you'd like me to tell you who it is? OK. The person whom you have all been worshipping for eleven years is in fact Richard Stallman, a man simultaneously venerated and vilified by the Slashdot community. When Linux started to become famous, Mikke knew that she was in deep water and that her hoax might be uncovered, so she decided to contact the most trustworthy man in the open source world. RMS was happy to cooperate, especially when he knew that Linux had completely overwhelmed the Hurd and that he might as well help; after all, if Linux was exposed as a giant falsification, mightn't his beloved GNU project be considered a hoax also? Neither could take the chance, and for that reason Stallman was perfectly happy to quickly purchase a cheap rubber mask and shave off some of his bodily hair.
Fast forward to 2002, and GNU/Linux is very stealthily taking over the server market. Mikke Torvalds' simple request has turned into a multi-million dollar industry, and Stallman's hobby and grand vision has actually begun to come to fruition. This is why, despite the fact that Linus Torvalds is actually a figment of our collective imagination, we should all honour him for being a prime symbol of our steadfast belief and ability to do what must be done. May his memory live on forever.
Actually, when I was watching Return of the Jedi last night, interespersed as bookends for each part of the film were adverts which featured people playing a car driving game that looked suspiciously like some sort of GTA. Sorry I can't remember what phone it is, exactly. No doubt some other Channel 3-watching geek will be able to tell you.
And they all pick from one of the 256 at random. This means that if there are 2 keyboards in range of each other, there is a 1 in 256 chance that they share a frequency. If there are 3, there is roughly a 1.2% (1 - (255/256 * 254/256)chance that one of them will have a collision with another. From here we can find the probability that a group of x keyboards will have at least 1 collision.
If a company were to buy these in bulk, then a collision becomes fairly likely. If 10 keyboards are placed in range, the figure rises to 16%. If 30 keyboards (roughly the size of a classroom) are placed all in range of each other, this becomes 83%. This could become a problem pretty quickly.
The reason why people buy DVDs even though they can't copy them is because there is little point in copying them for the average member of the public. You can't watch movies while you do something else as you can with music, so there's no need to really copy it; ever heard of a portable DVD player that lets you watch DVDs in high quality on the go? No, neither have I.
SETI@home was around first. That's why it has more users. It's the old faithful that most people know about. (Compare distributed.net to SETI and see how much the public knows about either.)
...couldn't Microsoft just be saying this to try and kick up sales of the Xbox? If the government refuses to change its position, then there'll probably be panic buying of Xboxes before MS withdraws them from Australia.
I thought I was odd for reaching at QuickBASIC every time I quickly needed to parse a list. (No, I don't have Perl or the like installed on this Win machine.)
1. Brazilian government sets up SourceForge project called "Open Electronic Voting System" with UNIX name "oevs".
2. Project is approved.
3. Brazilian government sets status of project to Planning/Alpha.
4. Brazilian government posts link to project as Slashdot story.
5. Submission is approved.
6. Thousands of geeks storm the site and develop a working open source electronic voting system in just 9 hours.
7. Er...profit?
Please, please, please learn to spell and punctuate. I know I probably seem pedantic, but I can handle the occasional spelling error. However, this just pissed me off. Go ahead and mod me down, but I just had to let this out.
"My god he's onto something."
Sigh...in this context, God is spelt with a capital letter.
"The old coot (empiror) is mr burns"
That should be emperor. And "mr" has a capital letter. FFS.
"and the guy in black (leather) could be smithers. bart and lisa as luke and lea? grandpa as obi wan?"
Smithers has a capital letter, since it is a name. Ditto Bart, Lisa, Luke and Leia. Leia has an i in it. Grandpa and Obi Wan are also capitalised, since they are also names.
...and saying "did you have 600K HTTP GETs worth of free time?" then just think about it.
You can find the number of users with a binary search. We know that the number of users is between 600K and 700K, so we can just use a binary search using 600K as a lower bound and 700K as an upper bound. With a 100K sized search then I think you should be able to find the exact number of users with no more than 17 requests. NOT 600 thousand. 17.
OK. You can't "allow" a specific percentage of your software to be pirated. However, you can encourage piracy completely, try and stamp out piracy completely, or allow piracy in some places but not in others. Each of these strategies helps to direct the exact amount of piracy to some desired (albeit wide) range.
Slashdot Mirror
...I have to worry about my TV exploding from the /. effect?
A first post being modded funny?! *universe explodes*
Ok, then, present it
Research XP. Research the alternatives. Use whichever works best.
...but will this extension work with Phoenix? Phoenix is based on Mozilla, but I'm not sure if its stripped-down manner will let this work.
Obviously, this "Linus Torvalds" must be some sort of superhuman to have done such a thing. But we all know that there is no such thing as a superhuman. As such it must be plain for all to see that this "Linus Torvalds" is some sort of fabrication. It is the only way to explain why Linus keeps such a low profile, and that the main bit of evidence to even suggest his existence is the testimony of his mother and the strange posts "he" makes on obscure message boards. The fact that an entire community of "warez doods" has sprung up, proclaiming that "LUNIX RULEZZZ" is such a flimsy piece of evidence it must be discounted. But if "Linus Torvalds" does not actually exist, then who has conjured up his existence? There is only one possible person who could get away with such a fraud. Mikke Torvalds, "his" supposed birth parent.
Mrs. Torvalds may have a lot to say about her son, but this does not excuse the fact that he does not exist. When you consider this, is it genuinely surprising that she found him "easy to raise"? Of course, there is one immediate objection which will no doubt be raised. "If Linus Torvalds doesn't really exist," I hear you ask, "then who wrote Linux?" That is a good question, but it is very obvious to see who. If you take a look around here for a while, you will hear names like Alan Cox, Richard Stallman, and Eric Raymond being bandied about. Obviously, it is immensely skilled coders and hackers such as these people who have made the wonderful OS Linux what it is today. The person who first made that post on comp.os.minix was in fact Linus' mother, who, frustrated by the ludicrous restrictions imposed upon her by Minix, posted a message under a partial pseudonym, asking for help building a new operating system. All she wanted was someone to help her use her PC to print out her recipes, but before she knew it she was in way over her head. Pretty soon Linux had hit 1.0 and strangers like Tanenbaum were talking about and cussing it.
Fortunately, Mikke had released the kernel under the GPL from the start, so she was able to dump it onto the shoulders of other people without arousing too much suspicion. Now she only has to make periodic appearances on Usenet and the like to avoid arousing the interest of news-hungry geeks and ZDNet reporters. "But what about the conferences?" you cry. "We have photographic evidence!" Well, that isn't Linus. Are you sure you'd like me to tell you who it is? OK. The person whom you have all been worshipping for eleven years is in fact Richard Stallman, a man simultaneously venerated and vilified by the Slashdot community. When Linux started to become famous, Mikke knew that she was in deep water and that her hoax might be uncovered, so she decided to contact the most trustworthy man in the open source world. RMS was happy to cooperate, especially when he knew that Linux had completely overwhelmed the Hurd and that he might as well help; after all, if Linux was exposed as a giant falsification, mightn't his beloved GNU project be considered a hoax also? Neither could take the chance, and for that reason Stallman was perfectly happy to quickly purchase a cheap rubber mask and shave off some of his bodily hair.
Fast forward to 2002, and GNU/Linux is very stealthily taking over the server market. Mikke Torvalds' simple request has turned into a multi-million dollar industry, and Stallman's hobby and grand vision has actually begun to come to fruition. This is why, despite the fact that Linus Torvalds is actually a figment of our collective imagination, we should all honour him for being a prime symbol of our steadfast belief and ability to do what must be done. May his memory live on forever.
Actually, when I was watching Return of the Jedi last night, interespersed as bookends for each part of the film were adverts which featured people playing a car driving game that looked suspiciously like some sort of GTA. Sorry I can't remember what phone it is, exactly. No doubt some other Channel 3-watching geek will be able to tell you.
If a company were to buy these in bulk, then a collision becomes fairly likely. If 10 keyboards are placed in range, the figure rises to 16%. If 30 keyboards (roughly the size of a classroom) are placed all in range of each other, this becomes 83%. This could become a problem pretty quickly.
The reason why people buy DVDs even though they can't copy them is because there is little point in copying them for the average member of the public. You can't watch movies while you do something else as you can with music, so there's no need to really copy it; ever heard of a portable DVD player that lets you watch DVDs in high quality on the go? No, neither have I.
How does a post with the topic "Re:Huh?" get (+4 Insightful)? Not a troll, just wondering.
SETI@home was around first. That's why it has more users. It's the old faithful that most people know about. (Compare distributed.net to SETI and see how much the public knows about either.)
...nah, forget it.
Are you allowed to withdraw things from PD, or is this another case of the US government abusing its power?
...couldn't Microsoft just be saying this to try and kick up sales of the Xbox? If the government refuses to change its position, then there'll probably be panic buying of Xboxes before MS withdraws them from Australia.
I thought I was odd for reaching at QuickBASIC every time I quickly needed to parse a list. (No, I don't have Perl or the like installed on this Win machine.)
They built their empire on rock and roll.
1. Brazilian government sets up SourceForge project called "Open Electronic Voting System" with UNIX name "oevs".
2. Project is approved.
3. Brazilian government sets status of project to Planning/Alpha.
4. Brazilian government posts link to project as Slashdot story.
5. Submission is approved.
6. Thousands of geeks storm the site and develop a working open source electronic voting system in just 9 hours.
7. Er...profit?
Foundation 0wnz them both.
Require zero force to work with? Is that even physically possible?
"My god he's onto something."
Sigh...in this context, God is spelt with a capital letter.
"The old coot (empiror) is mr burns"
That should be emperor. And "mr" has a capital letter. FFS.
"and the guy in black (leather) could be smithers. bart and lisa as luke and lea? grandpa as obi wan?"
Smithers has a capital letter, since it is a name. Ditto Bart, Lisa, Luke and Leia. Leia has an i in it. Grandpa and Obi Wan are also capitalised, since they are also names.
Don't blame me. Blame the anal-retentive English teacher who lives in my forebrain.
> post comment on slashdot about if
Comment posted.
> wait
Time passes.
> wait
Profit!
> score
You have a score of 50 out of 50, earning you the rank of Excellent.
Oh, and by the way, the story's from 1998, making it about 4 1/2 years old. Not bad.
You can find the number of users with a binary search. We know that the number of users is between 600K and 700K, so we can just use a binary search using 600K as a lower bound and 700K as an upper bound. With a 100K sized search then I think you should be able to find the exact number of users with no more than 17 requests. NOT 600 thousand. 17.
Oh, come on! How could you not see that coming? ;-)
OK. You can't "allow" a specific percentage of your software to be pirated. However, you can encourage piracy completely, try and stamp out piracy completely, or allow piracy in some places but not in others. Each of these strategies helps to direct the exact amount of piracy to some desired (albeit wide) range.