Not exactly a loan. Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. Common wisdom at the time was that Microsoft needed to prop up some kind of paper tiger competitor to avoid further anti-trust restrictions.
In the corporate word, lending money and buying stock are just two different ways to invest in a company. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages for the investor and the company, but they fundamentally fill the same purpose.
I always thought the main point of VLC is that it does not rely on the often broken collection of installed codecs. It "just works" even if the rest of the system is messed up in all kinds of ways.
I used to have NoScript with default to not run scripts, but I have given up. It is doable as long as you just browse the web, though you will have to whitelist a lot of sites to get them to work and embedded video will often just not play. The real problems come when you want to use travel booking sites, corporate career sites, banking and many online shopping sites. Those require a lot of JavaScript and will send you around between different domains and servers in ways that appear to be indistinguishable from XSS attacks. You cannot know before you start either, there will just be a blank page in the middle.
I still use NoScript, but in the blacklist mode. It stops some common attacks and lets me block annoying scripts such as in the article here.
They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014.
Just to be clear: There are several launch systems capable of sending "things" into space, just not people. Things like Mars rovers and probes to other planets and comets don't use man-rated launchers.
My computer experience tells me you've got two kinds of users. Idiots and non-idiots.
This is a common mental mistake of Slashdotters. Of course there is a scale of various levels of knowledge. Perhaps even more importantly, a person can be an expert in some subjects and an idiot in others.
We know how to land in vacuum with little gravity. Mars has too strong gravity to use rockets all the way. Both parachutes and breaking rockets are still useful for landing on Mars, but it is very different from both Earth and the Moon.
I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.
1,000 articles total 800 are crap 200 are good
All 800 crap articles are deleted. 100 of the good ones are also deleted. 800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct, so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.
I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.
1,000 articles total 800 are crap 200 are good
All 800 crap articles are deleted. 100 of the good ones are also deleted. 800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
Except Wikipedia is far from finished. Sure, the subjects the subjects the average Wikipedia writer (or Slashdotter) is likely to look up are well covered. Some subject areas were pretty much covered already in 2004. There is an article on pretty much every American town, film, band, athlete etc, but as soon as you go outside North America, Europe, Japan and Australia it gets a lot more sparse.
There is also a huge number of historical people with no articles. Whole academic subjects such as philosophy are barely covered and not very well written. Events before 2001 that aren't frequently referenced today is not nearly as well covered as recent events.
-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots).
On the other hand, with Ubuntu you are stuck with old versions of applications until you upgrade the whole system. For application software that is unlikely to break other things, I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.
If one of these companies goes bankrupt, their creditors will demand the only valuable asset: the domain name. Does their agreement with 301Works overrule the creditors claims?
Does Google give any code and patches back to the Linux kernel maintainers? Since they probably only use it internally and never distribute anything they are not required to by the GPL, but it would still be the right thing to do.
The big question with USB 3.0 is the price. That is the big advantage of USB over competitors like FireWire. Cables, host controllers, devices, hubs, everything is cheap. USB 3.0 looks a lot more complicated. The cables are much thicker with more wires and shielding. A USB 3.0 hub has to contain everything a USB 2.0 hub does, plus the new SuperSpeed part which is no longer just a dumb hub but more like a switch or router.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly a loan. Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. Common wisdom at the time was that Microsoft needed to prop up some kind of paper tiger competitor to avoid further anti-trust restrictions.
In the corporate word, lending money and buying stock are just two different ways to invest in a company. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages for the investor and the company, but they fundamentally fill the same purpose.
I always thought the main point of VLC is that it does not rely on the often broken collection of installed codecs. It "just works" even if the rest of the system is messed up in all kinds of ways.
THX probably knew they were losing credibility and decided to cash in quickly.
I used to have NoScript with default to not run scripts, but I have given up. It is doable as long as you just browse the web, though you will have to whitelist a lot of sites to get them to work and embedded video will often just not play. The real problems come when you want to use travel booking sites, corporate career sites, banking and many online shopping sites. Those require a lot of JavaScript and will send you around between different domains and servers in ways that appear to be indistinguishable from XSS attacks. You cannot know before you start either, there will just be a blank page in the middle.
I still use NoScript, but in the blacklist mode. It stops some common attacks and lets me block annoying scripts such as in the article here.
I am honestly curious: What advantage is a "modern RISC architecture" if you are not writing in Assembly anyway?
They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014.
Just to be clear: There are several launch systems capable of sending "things" into space, just not people. Things like Mars rovers and probes to other planets and comets don't use man-rated launchers.
Why would that be a good idea? Just private good m'kay?
Not even a hardline anti-government libertarian should want to just give tax money to a private corporation.
My computer experience tells me you've got two kinds of users. Idiots and non-idiots.
This is a common mental mistake of Slashdotters. Of course there is a scale of various levels of knowledge. Perhaps even more importantly, a person can be an expert in some subjects and an idiot in others.
We know how to land in vacuum with little gravity. Mars has too strong gravity to use rockets all the way. Both parachutes and breaking rockets are still useful for landing on Mars, but it is very different from both Earth and the Moon.
Do you know anything about tree rings? Why was this modded up?
If said work of "skeptics" was crap, then criticizing a journal for publishing crap is completely reasonable.
Wasn't this some stacks of punch cards that was thrown out in the mid-80s sometime?
How is that going to help you when they refuse to let you in at the border check?
I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.
1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good
All 800 crap articles are deleted.
100 of the good ones are also deleted.
800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct, so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.
I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.
1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good
All 800 crap articles are deleted.
100 of the good ones are also deleted.
800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
Except Wikipedia is far from finished. Sure, the subjects the subjects the average Wikipedia writer (or Slashdotter) is likely to look up are well covered. Some subject areas were pretty much covered already in 2004. There is an article on pretty much every American town, film, band, athlete etc, but as soon as you go outside North America, Europe, Japan and Australia it gets a lot more sparse.
There is also a huge number of historical people with no articles. Whole academic subjects such as philosophy are barely covered and not very well written. Events before 2001 that aren't frequently referenced today is not nearly as well covered as recent events.
Well quite a lot of stuff is available in the backports repository.
How much tricks does that require? Will it break stuff when finally upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu?
-Fedora is not even stable within a release cycle in terms of offered featureset. I.e. I recall gaim 1.x being replaced with gaim 2.0 one day without requiring any particular update. This is good for enthusiasts who always want the cutting edge, bad for end-users who only want change at certain times they could expect (and for documenters doing screenshots).
On the other hand, with Ubuntu you are stuck with old versions of applications until you upgrade the whole system. For application software that is unlikely to break other things, I wish it was possible to upgrade to a new major version without upgrading everything else at once. It shouldn't be pushed as an automatic or opt-out update though, only manual or opt-in.
A country is not just its government.
If one of these companies goes bankrupt, their creditors will demand the only valuable asset: the domain name. Does their agreement with 301Works overrule the creditors claims?
Everything uses port 80 these days. Thank NAT for that.
Does Google give any code and patches back to the Linux kernel maintainers? Since they probably only use it internally and never distribute anything they are not required to by the GPL, but it would still be the right thing to do.
There is still isohunt, mininova, demonoid and torrentreactor
How many of those actually run their own trackers, rather than piggybacking on The Pirate Bay?
The big question with USB 3.0 is the price. That is the big advantage of USB over competitors like FireWire. Cables, host controllers, devices, hubs, everything is cheap. USB 3.0 looks a lot more complicated. The cables are much thicker with more wires and shielding. A USB 3.0 hub has to contain everything a USB 2.0 hub does, plus the new SuperSpeed part which is no longer just a dumb hub but more like a switch or router.