"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Gandhi
I've suspected for a few years that the "they fight you" stage couldn't be far away, since we've arguably passed the "laugh at you" stage — and I'm afraid we've quietly entered that phase. First, it was SCO, EU Software Patents, then Novell/Microsoft, and now Ballmer has openly done his saber-rattling. The worst of the war is yet to come, I fear.
Happily, it seems some companies are finally getting the message that longer passwords does not necessarily mean a more secure system. I know of at least one well-known security software company that has recently revised its stringent password policy from "super long, with numbers and punctuation, changed every 30 days" down to "less long, and you don't have to change it nearly as often".
I'm guessing they had a security audit quietly done, wherein it was discovered that paying a janitor $20 to look for password Post-Its or doing a quick social engineering telephone call could break past more security than 100,000 CPU-hours of password cracking.
I'm glad to see the FCC taking this small first step, but I don't have a lot of hope for how much this would help. When you think about it, all the sleazy monopolistic telecom companies are basically offering the exact same service: transferring bits from one end of a network to another. Of course, instead of treating this service like what it is (i.e. a commodity) and charging appropriately, the telecoms love pretending that they're offering something unique and, of course, charging excessively for it. Witness the outrageous rates for text messages (which should cost a fraction of what a voice call costs), EDGE/GPRS (voice calls are already almost always transferred digitally.. and yet the telecoms pretend they've built separate special data-only networks that you must pay an extra $50/month for), "Powerboost" from Comcast (who is RST'ing bittorrent conns to eke out the bandwidth to do this).
If the FCC really wants to help us consumers, how about freeing up a reasonable portion of the spectrum, that's not competing with microwave ovens and cordless phones, for free use in consumer devices. Maybe then we could solve the "last mile problem" our own damn selves without depending on these crooked telecoms who seem to only be concerned with merging with each other, eating up government handouts, and ignoring consumer complaints.
I found myself googling this, so thought I would share with potential bidders.
Short version: you might have a hard time deducting any money you spend on this charity auction, unless you can show the amount you paid was purposely above fair market value -- according to The IRS. I'm not sure how you'd come up with a 'fair market value' for e.g. an @slashdot.org email address.. but I guess it could be done.
Cheers and happy bidding, remember it's for a good cause
Thankfully, we no longer need to use this outdated technology of "emoticons" to denote humorous sentiments in email and online postings. Some have historically proposed the use of a "sarcasm" tag littered among ordinary text to convey the sarcastic emotion more accurately. I propose going one step further, and am proposing the Humour-XML standard, which will provide a much richer way to fully denote sentiments on the web. For instance, consider the sarcastic exprssion:
I'll get right on that;-)
Even in this simple expression, the smiley face does not convey enough information to the reader to properly discern the mood of the poster. It is left ambiguous whether the poster is completely sarcastic, and will not "get right on that", or if the poster was merely in a humorous mood and implying that they will "get right on that" in a cheerful way. This failure to communicate is costing the American economy untold billions in lost productivity, rivaling that of "sick days" and movie piracy. The following is a rough draft of an XML standard I am proposing to completely eliminate our dependence on this obsolete form of communication.
I propose a full XML schema devoted to conveying emotion in email, web postings, and Usenet "flame" messages. For instance, the previous message would be written in Humour-XML as:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<posting>
<message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"/>
</message>
</posting>
The message now contains no ambiguities — the reader understands that the poster is "highly sarcastic" , and does not actually intend to "get right on that"
The Humour-XML schema provides numerous benefits to users such as: enhanced text-to-speech renderings of postings (the speaker's voice could convey emotion, etc.), backwards compatibility with obsolete emoticons, UTF-8 support, building the Semantic Web from the ground up, and other benefits too numerous to enumerate here. Without extolling the virtues of this fantastic language too greatly, I'll touch on one more gold mine of usability: using XSLT to transfrom Humour-XML to other forms, such as emoticon-text or even SVG graphics. For instance, we can define an XSLT stylesheet like so:
The example XSLT spreadsheet provided here should provide posters eager to try this amazing technology a head-start. I am in the process of carefully constructing a DTD for Humour-XML, as well as several more very useful XSLT stylesheets. I hereby disclaim all patents on said technology, and promise that Humour-XML is free for the world to use royalty-free, forever.
Check out the dossier page for ameritrade on SiteAdvisor -- you'll see they have a dossier of spams sent out by Ameritrade.
Note, they've been getting a green rating because SA felt they didn't deserve to get a red rating overall because they are a trusted financial institution.. however it's very likely they'll be getting a red rating overall quite soon, which might have quite an impact on Ameritrade's bottom line given SA's enormous user base.
I am (well, was, at least) an Erlang Programmer. I was toying around with Erlang for some small projects with distributed programming.
I've been looking forward to Joe's book for a long time, as he's one of the few big names in the Erlang community, and has done a lot of work (both code and, even more importantly, documentation) for the community -- first that jumps to mind is his important look at Yaws vs. apache.
There are serious problems with the Erlang language as a whole and the community, right now. The mailing lists are actually pretty good, but quite frankly, the documentation online is terrible and the Erlang interpreter is pretty rudimentary. Not to mention basic problems with the syntax and grammar of the Erlang language itself. When I was learning Erlang a few months back, I was pretty frustrated that about the only source of documentation was on erlang.org, and they.. weren't great. For instance, there needs to be a big warning right at the beginning explaining that atomic values always start with a lowercase letter and all other variables must begin with a capital letter. This must be a huge problem for other beginners (at least, I hope I assume I wasn't alone..) compounded by the unfriendliness of the error messages produced by the Erlang interpreter.
Now that I've switched over to doing as much as I can in Python, which has a great user community, wonderful docs, a healthy standard library, and a reasonably helpful interpreter.. I don't really worry about Erlang that much anymore. It would be wonderful if I could write, say, web crawlers (I work in web security) in Erlang. But the mysql support in Erlang looks alpha-quality at best, and AFAIK there's nothing even remotely similar to Python's urllib2 for basic web client functionality in Erlang.
I think it says a lot that so much attention is paid to a language that is so rough around the edges, unfriendly, and lacking in documentation. Even given all that.. the ease of use of the concurrency and message passing in Erlang is so fantastic that it almost makes up for the rough spots.
On a final note, I'd like to point out to anyone interested that I think there's a huge void out there for a language that's as easy to use and learn as Python, but with the concurrency and message passing in Erlang. It actually might not take that much work to build a network-transparent message passing interface as a Python module (I've looked into Pyro a bit.. it looks rather cumbersome and makes easy things too hard, correct me if I'm wrong). Also, modern languages need basic support for splitting up the workloads of map() or similar trivially parallelizable functions across multiple processors/cores (I know the Perl6 group was thinking about this.. not sure if this works in Parrot now or what). Basically, modern languages like Python/Perl/Ruby should really think more about making simple modules to mimic the message passing that Erlang has. Really, a little bit of code could go a long way. The Google team put together sawzall which looks kind of cool, on this note..
I really enjoyed seeing the quote by Linus (this is a program for hackers by a hacker). He clearly never, ever, expected his little hobby project to catch on the way it did. Hope this gives hope and inspiration to all the OSS developers out there, scratching their own itches. Just looking back on the history of the software industry, it seems like so many tremendous ideas and businesses got started around a small hobby project by one or two smart guys: Google, Perl, Python, Linux, GNU, and so on. Remember that one man change history.
I can't help but wonder how realistic this scenario is.. They're basically going to have a single server dumping a whole ton of spam at your filtering package, and you're supposed to be able to filter on.. what, just the content of the messages? Real world techniques use many more subtle hacks, such as greylisting, or actually looking at the domains the messages are coming from. If their server is going to be dumping millions of messages at you in a short amount of time, I don't think they'll let you use greylisting or similar techniques.
One other gripe I have about the new name is that they've chosen the domain name "Pidgin.im". While cute, I really don't think it's appropriate for them to be using the.im ccTLD, which is supposed to be for sites pertaining to or located in the Isle of Mann. Yes, Yes, I know it's cute and all to use.im for the site of a free IM program (just like all the spammy sites using.fm or.tv), and it looks like pidgin.com has already been parked by some sleazebags, but this is really just diluting the whole purpose of having ccTLD's in the first place, as well as making it harder for programmers/people/search engines to deduce the purpose of a site from its ccTLD. Oh well..
If I were more cynical, of course, I'd suggest that ICANN created all these different ccTLDs knowing full well that they wouldn't be used appropriately, but already hooked on the hundreds of millions of dollars in domain registration fees they're getting.
Yeah, the article's a crock of shit for many reasons -- possible discrepancies between the players being one of them. I'd argue that reviewer bias would be much more troubling to anyone looking to take these stats seriously. Especially among audio/video-philes.. if you read online or wherever that Format A uses some slightly better technique for audio/video compression than Format B.. chances are, when you're doing a supposedly impartial review between the two formats, you'll prefer to select Format A as the winner.
The only way you could have a non-biased study of this sort is if you selected random candidates, had them watch a movie on your hi-def setup without telling them what format it was (or even know yourself), and then ask them to rate the A/V quality (a crude double-blind study). If you're thinking about investing in one of these formats over the other, take this "study" with a very large grain of salt, especially when the differences are so small. The only thing I'm believing is that HD-DVD *probably* has a bit better extras, not that I care one whit for these junk formats.
I'd just like to point out, that yes, it would be great to do real-time raytracing with such powerful processors. Last week I was up until 6 in the morning waiting for a 2+ hour render of a reasonably simple scene to finish. Yeah, these procs would be great... if someone could just write a parallelizable version of POV-ray for Linux. Before someone jumps in to point to the few ports out there, let me head you off:
A distributed version of POV-ray exists using the MPI library, but it's based on the pretty old 3.1 branch (POV-ray is on 3.6beta right now). This is important because even the newest POV-ray betas have pretty vanilla features compared to some of the other experimental branches (like Mega POV) that include things like motion blur to simulate moving objects, etc. I haven't even tried MPI Pov because I like playing around with the must-have toys like radiosity.
A version that looks really good for Windows (bleh..) and is based off the 3.6 branch is SMPov. I really, really, really wish someone would port this to Linux so that I could have a chance to play..
And, finally, there is a patch to POV-ray that will work on Linux using the PVM library -- and it will work with the 3.5 branch. Sounds good, until you read the Howto. Quoting directly: Radiosity is not working. The resulting image looks like a mosaic. The energy bias for each block is different because the radiosity equation is not globally resolved correctly.
I suppose someone's going to tell me I should just do it myself. *Sigh*. I'm actually learning Erlang right now to learn more about distributed processing. Maybe, someday..
A tiny issue to be sure, but I'm appreciative of the website linked for providing a video link that's easy to use, even in Linux.
Addressing the larger scheme of things, I'd just like to say it's sad how politics seems to eventually run into centrism, especially for the presidential elections, due to the "winner takes all" approach. I was really rooting for Dean during the last primaries, but it seems like the Dems preferred a more bland candidate. Oh well. Here's to hoping that people have wised up since '04.
This whole article sounded a little fishy to me. First of all, why didn't they even mention the more general applications of this generator -- namely converting municipal waste into electricity. I know several attempts have been made in the past, (e.g. Trash to Natural Gas). Universities love bragging about the exciting possibilities for any new technology they develop. Seems strange they'd only mention military applications. One possible explanation is that the work was conducted under a military grant, and that's how they're billing it for now.. but still...
And why haven't they done a real-world test of its capabilities. A simple experiment would be to randomly select some households, have them save their suitable trash in a special bin, and see how well this device handles real-world fare. Their quoted energy balance of +90% sounds pretty dubious. Especially with no real clues about how it does this, other than some handwaving about "parallel processes" and a diesel engine. I'll hold the praise for when this thing is actually put into action in the real world.
Tell them how you discovered the bug (are you a full-time security researcher, just a hobbyist, discovered it by accident?). Tell them the potential severity. Then, as a footnote, mention your skills in patching security holes (assuming you have any) and offer to help them fix this hole, and potential other ones. Don't mention money in your initial email.
If you tell them upfront that you want $$$ to fix the hole, it's going to sound an awful lot like extortion. What you might think of as a friendly e-mail offering help, they could see as "Pay me $$$ and this/further vulnerabilities won't get released to the blackhats". So just treat them nicely, and hope for the same in return.
If they do sit on their asses for more than two weeks or so, it's probably alright to release the vulnerability to the public -- possibly anonymously if you fear retribution. Use tor/remailer if you have to publicly disclose and don't want BigCorp harassing you forever. They may suspect it was you who disclosed the vulnerability, but all they would have is a hunch. Good luck.
You'd be amazed at where life can exist. Coincidentally, just a week ago they found bacteria living 2.8km down in a mine, that also fueled speculation of 'life on Mars'.
Some really cool critters we've known about for a while exist in the Deep Sea ocean vents, and subsist off the chemicals coming through the cracks in the Earth's crust. Another one people didn't hear too much about were bacteria that lived on top of the Surveyor 3 craft that went to the moon and back with the Apollo 11 crew, and basically survived for 3 years in space on nothing. (I remember this stuff because I wrote a paper on the feasibility of life on a planet without a Sun.)
Vanilla WMP11 rips to WMA format, but doesn't encode DRM into it.
I don't see why there's so much defense of the WMA format, even if it doesn't have DRM turned on. It's not an open standard (unlike AAC, which is what iTunes rips to by default). According to Wikipedia, it's only due to the brilliance of reverse engineers at Real and FFmpeg that one is able to play WMA at all on *nix. And there's no guarantee on how long that'll last before MS "modifies the format for better compression" or some other BS. Stay the hell away from WMA, DRM or no.
I know this "Male Pill" at best won't hit the market for a few years, and possibly never will.. but just in case some of you have been living under rocks for the past 20 years, and take the 'Insightful' parent seriously -- Don't have unprotected sex with strangers. Wear a condom. You might have heard of STDs, though the topic doesn't seem to come up on/. very often for some reason.
If you know that both you and your lady have recently tested clean, then you can start worrying about birth control or Male Pill or whatnot.
Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux? Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap? According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.
And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with/proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?
Any social network founder that's willing to pass up $100 per user is "seriously disconnected from reality". In order to earn that much in ad revenue per user, each user would have to click ~400 ads over the site's lifetime assuming a very generous 25 cents/click. That, or you have to assume exponential growth of users will continue indefinitely. Riiight. And I don't even want to know what their bandwidth bills are like for all the images they host. I seem to remember this business model from a few years ago...
Just so you know, LabVIEW is in fact offered for Linux. I'm forced to use it on Windows myself, but I'm seriously thinking about switching our lab's measurement comps to Linux for ease of scripting, stability, etc.
The Nokia 770 is, from what I can tell, just short of incredible -- runs Linux, nice big screen, and they've just released a new firmware. Only trouble is, for some mysterious reason, despite advertising the 770 on CNN, Nokia has strangled the supply of them. I'm absolutely baffled why they'd do this, but check Froogle -- the only place in the US that has them in stock for a non-inflated price is TigerDirect (the AdminPal link on Froogle is misleading), and for a price of $380+shipping, a bit steep for a tablet that's more than a year old now. I've looked in vain for a B&M store carrying them. CompUSA had them listed previously for $350 with free shipping, but they were never ever in stock for either delivery or in-store pickup anywhere in the country.
Even Nokia's USA page has listed them as being out of stock for at least the past few weeks. I'm a bit baffled why Nokia would do this to a product that has such huge geek appeal and a lot of grassroots FOSS software ported to it. My only hypothesis is that the US cellular companies that Nokia's in bed with are trying to push their bullshit data plans, and aren't happy about the emergence of tablets with WiFi that cuts them out of $50/month subscriptions.
Nokia, if you're listening, I'd been dying to snatch up a 770 for a reasonable price for the past few weeks, but due to your incompetence I'm settling for an Axim which is cheaper, faster, smaller.. but with Windows Mobile bullshit that offsets those advantages.
Indeed. I'd been initially very skeptical of any publication with the name "Christian Science Monitor".. until I read a few of their pieces. They're well-written, and actually very well respected, with good reason. Check the Wikipedia Article, they have almost no religious affiliation, great reporting (seven time Pulitzer winner), and stick their neck out for reporters on the line.
Also, off-topic a little, but if you live in or plan on visiting Boston anytime.. check out the Mapparium, which is located in a library belonging to the CSM. I wasn't too impressed by the thought of seeing what's essentially a really large globe until I actually got to go inside.. the acoustics alone are enough to take your breath away -- you can hear the faintest whisper along the inner diameter (a long way). Pictures don't do it the faintest justice, but here'sone.
Slashdot Mirror
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Gandhi
I've suspected for a few years that the "they fight you" stage couldn't be far away, since we've arguably passed the "laugh at you" stage — and I'm afraid we've quietly entered that phase. First, it was SCO, EU Software Patents, then Novell/Microsoft, and now Ballmer has openly done his saber-rattling. The worst of the war is yet to come, I fear.
Happily, it seems some companies are finally getting the message that longer passwords does not necessarily mean a more secure system. I know of at least one well-known security software company that has recently revised its stringent password policy from "super long, with numbers and punctuation, changed every 30 days" down to "less long, and you don't have to change it nearly as often".
I'm guessing they had a security audit quietly done, wherein it was discovered that paying a janitor $20 to look for password Post-Its or doing a quick social engineering telephone call could break past more security than 100,000 CPU-hours of password cracking.
I'm glad to see the FCC taking this small first step, but I don't have a lot of hope for how much this would help. When you think about it, all the sleazy monopolistic telecom companies are basically offering the exact same service: transferring bits from one end of a network to another. Of course, instead of treating this service like what it is (i.e. a commodity) and charging appropriately, the telecoms love pretending that they're offering something unique and, of course, charging excessively for it. Witness the outrageous rates for text messages (which should cost a fraction of what a voice call costs), EDGE/GPRS (voice calls are already almost always transferred digitally.. and yet the telecoms pretend they've built separate special data-only networks that you must pay an extra $50/month for), "Powerboost" from Comcast (who is RST'ing bittorrent conns to eke out the bandwidth to do this).
If the FCC really wants to help us consumers, how about freeing up a reasonable portion of the spectrum, that's not competing with microwave ovens and cordless phones, for free use in consumer devices. Maybe then we could solve the "last mile problem" our own damn selves without depending on these crooked telecoms who seem to only be concerned with merging with each other, eating up government handouts, and ignoring consumer complaints.
I found myself googling this, so thought I would share with potential bidders.
Short version: you might have a hard time deducting any money you spend on this charity auction, unless you can show the amount you paid was purposely above fair market value -- according to The IRS. I'm not sure how you'd come up with a 'fair market value' for e.g. an @slashdot.org email address.. but I guess it could be done.
Cheers and happy bidding, remember it's for a good cause
Thankfully, we no longer need to use this outdated technology of "emoticons" to denote humorous sentiments in email and online postings. Some have historically proposed the use of a "sarcasm" tag littered among ordinary text to convey the sarcastic emotion more accurately. I propose going one step further, and am proposing the Humour-XML standard, which will provide a much richer way to fully denote sentiments on the web. For instance, consider the sarcastic exprssion:
I'll get right on thatEven in this simple expression, the smiley face does not convey enough information to the reader to properly discern the mood of the poster. It is left ambiguous whether the poster is completely sarcastic, and will not "get right on that", or if the poster was merely in a humorous mood and implying that they will "get right on that" in a cheerful way. This failure to communicate is costing the American economy untold billions in lost productivity, rivaling that of "sick days" and movie piracy. The following is a rough draft of an XML standard I am proposing to completely eliminate our dependence on this obsolete form of communication.
I propose a full XML schema devoted to conveying emotion in email, web postings, and Usenet "flame" messages. For instance, the previous message would be written in Humour-XML as:
<?xml version="1.0"?> />
<posting>
<message mood="sarcastic" level="highly"> I'll get right on that <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"
</message>
</posting>
The message now contains no ambiguities — the reader understands that the poster is "highly sarcastic" , and does not actually intend to "get right on that"
The Humour-XML schema provides numerous benefits to users such as: enhanced text-to-speech renderings of postings (the speaker's voice could convey emotion, etc.), backwards compatibility with obsolete emoticons, UTF-8 support, building the Semantic Web from the ground up, and other benefits too numerous to enumerate here. Without extolling the virtues of this fantastic language too greatly, I'll touch on one more gold mine of usability: using XSLT to transfrom Humour-XML to other forms, such as emoticon-text or even SVG graphics. For instance, we can define an XSLT stylesheet like so:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
/> </xsl:text>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="posting">
<emoticon_text> <xsl:apply-templates/> </emoticon_text>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="message">
<xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates> </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="message">
<xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="symbol"
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The example XSLT spreadsheet provided here should provide posters eager to try this amazing technology a head-start. I am in the process of carefully constructing a DTD for Humour-XML, as well as several more very useful XSLT stylesheets. I hereby disclaim all patents on said technology, and promise that Humour-XML is free for the world to use royalty-free, forever.
Check out the dossier page for ameritrade on SiteAdvisor -- you'll see they have a dossier of spams sent out by Ameritrade. Note, they've been getting a green rating because SA felt they didn't deserve to get a red rating overall because they are a trusted financial institution.. however it's very likely they'll be getting a red rating overall quite soon, which might have quite an impact on Ameritrade's bottom line given SA's enormous user base.
I am (well, was, at least) an Erlang Programmer. I was toying around with Erlang for some small projects with distributed programming.
I've been looking forward to Joe's book for a long time, as he's one of the few big names in the Erlang community, and has done a lot of work (both code and, even more importantly, documentation) for the community -- first that jumps to mind is his important look at Yaws vs. apache.
There are serious problems with the Erlang language as a whole and the community, right now. The mailing lists are actually pretty good, but quite frankly, the documentation online is terrible and the Erlang interpreter is pretty rudimentary. Not to mention basic problems with the syntax and grammar of the Erlang language itself. When I was learning Erlang a few months back, I was pretty frustrated that about the only source of documentation was on erlang.org, and they.. weren't great. For instance, there needs to be a big warning right at the beginning explaining that atomic values always start with a lowercase letter and all other variables must begin with a capital letter. This must be a huge problem for other beginners (at least, I hope I assume I wasn't alone..) compounded by the unfriendliness of the error messages produced by the Erlang interpreter.
Now that I've switched over to doing as much as I can in Python, which has a great user community, wonderful docs, a healthy standard library, and a reasonably helpful interpreter.. I don't really worry about Erlang that much anymore. It would be wonderful if I could write, say, web crawlers (I work in web security) in Erlang. But the mysql support in Erlang looks alpha-quality at best, and AFAIK there's nothing even remotely similar to Python's urllib2 for basic web client functionality in Erlang.
I think it says a lot that so much attention is paid to a language that is so rough around the edges, unfriendly, and lacking in documentation. Even given all that.. the ease of use of the concurrency and message passing in Erlang is so fantastic that it almost makes up for the rough spots.
On a final note, I'd like to point out to anyone interested that I think there's a huge void out there for a language that's as easy to use and learn as Python, but with the concurrency and message passing in Erlang. It actually might not take that much work to build a network-transparent message passing interface as a Python module (I've looked into Pyro a bit.. it looks rather cumbersome and makes easy things too hard, correct me if I'm wrong). Also, modern languages need basic support for splitting up the workloads of map() or similar trivially parallelizable functions across multiple processors/cores (I know the Perl6 group was thinking about this.. not sure if this works in Parrot now or what). Basically, modern languages like Python/Perl/Ruby should really think more about making simple modules to mimic the message passing that Erlang has. Really, a little bit of code could go a long way. The Google team put together sawzall which looks kind of cool, on this note..
I really enjoyed seeing the quote by Linus (this is a program for hackers by a hacker). He clearly never, ever, expected his little hobby project to catch on the way it did. Hope this gives hope and inspiration to all the OSS developers out there, scratching their own itches. Just looking back on the history of the software industry, it seems like so many tremendous ideas and businesses got started around a small hobby project by one or two smart guys: Google, Perl, Python, Linux, GNU, and so on. Remember that one man change history.
I don't know.. a P/E of 43.6 just doesn't seem like "sound business principles".
I have a feeling I know where that chart is headed in the next 2-5 years...
I can't help but wonder how realistic this scenario is.. They're basically going to have a single server dumping a whole ton of spam at your filtering package, and you're supposed to be able to filter on.. what, just the content of the messages? Real world techniques use many more subtle hacks, such as greylisting, or actually looking at the domains the messages are coming from. If their server is going to be dumping millions of messages at you in a short amount of time, I don't think they'll let you use greylisting or similar techniques.
One other gripe I have about the new name is that they've chosen the domain name "Pidgin.im". While cute, I really don't think it's appropriate for them to be using the .im ccTLD, which is supposed to be for sites pertaining to or located in the Isle of Mann. Yes, Yes, I know it's cute and all to use .im for the site of a free IM program (just like all the spammy sites using .fm or .tv), and it looks like pidgin.com has already been parked by some sleazebags, but this is really just diluting the whole purpose of having ccTLD's in the first place, as well as making it harder for programmers/people/search engines to deduce the purpose of a site from its ccTLD. Oh well..
If I were more cynical, of course, I'd suggest that ICANN created all these different ccTLDs knowing full well that they wouldn't be used appropriately, but already hooked on the hundreds of millions of dollars in domain registration fees they're getting.
Yeah, the article's a crock of shit for many reasons -- possible discrepancies between the players being one of them. I'd argue that reviewer bias would be much more troubling to anyone looking to take these stats seriously. Especially among audio/video-philes.. if you read online or wherever that Format A uses some slightly better technique for audio/video compression than Format B.. chances are, when you're doing a supposedly impartial review between the two formats, you'll prefer to select Format A as the winner.
The only way you could have a non-biased study of this sort is if you selected random candidates, had them watch a movie on your hi-def setup without telling them what format it was (or even know yourself), and then ask them to rate the A/V quality (a crude double-blind study). If you're thinking about investing in one of these formats over the other, take this "study" with a very large grain of salt, especially when the differences are so small. The only thing I'm believing is that HD-DVD *probably* has a bit better extras, not that I care one whit for these junk formats.
I'd just like to point out, that yes, it would be great to do real-time raytracing with such powerful processors. Last week I was up until 6 in the morning waiting for a 2+ hour render of a reasonably simple scene to finish. Yeah, these procs would be great... if someone could just write a parallelizable version of POV-ray for Linux. Before someone jumps in to point to the few ports out there, let me head you off:
A distributed version of POV-ray exists using the MPI library, but it's based on the pretty old 3.1 branch (POV-ray is on 3.6beta right now). This is important because even the newest POV-ray betas have pretty vanilla features compared to some of the other experimental branches (like Mega POV) that include things like motion blur to simulate moving objects, etc. I haven't even tried MPI Pov because I like playing around with the must-have toys like radiosity.
A version that looks really good for Windows (bleh..) and is based off the 3.6 branch is SMPov. I really, really, really wish someone would port this to Linux so that I could have a chance to play..
And, finally, there is a patch to POV-ray that will work on Linux using the PVM library -- and it will work with the 3.5 branch. Sounds good, until you read the Howto. Quoting directly: Radiosity is not working. The resulting image looks like a mosaic. The energy bias for each block is different because the radiosity equation is not globally resolved correctly.
I suppose someone's going to tell me I should just do it myself. *Sigh*. I'm actually learning Erlang right now to learn more about distributed processing. Maybe, someday..
A tiny issue to be sure, but I'm appreciative of the website linked for providing a video link that's easy to use, even in Linux.
Addressing the larger scheme of things, I'd just like to say it's sad how politics seems to eventually run into centrism, especially for the presidential elections, due to the "winner takes all" approach. I was really rooting for Dean during the last primaries, but it seems like the Dems preferred a more bland candidate. Oh well. Here's to hoping that people have wised up since '04.
This whole article sounded a little fishy to me. First of all, why didn't they even mention the more general applications of this generator -- namely converting municipal waste into electricity. I know several attempts have been made in the past, (e.g. Trash to Natural Gas). Universities love bragging about the exciting possibilities for any new technology they develop. Seems strange they'd only mention military applications. One possible explanation is that the work was conducted under a military grant, and that's how they're billing it for now.. but still...
And why haven't they done a real-world test of its capabilities. A simple experiment would be to randomly select some households, have them save their suitable trash in a special bin, and see how well this device handles real-world fare. Their quoted energy balance of +90% sounds pretty dubious. Especially with no real clues about how it does this, other than some handwaving about "parallel processes" and a diesel engine. I'll hold the praise for when this thing is actually put into action in the real world.
Tell them how you discovered the bug (are you a full-time security researcher, just a hobbyist, discovered it by accident?). Tell them the potential severity. Then, as a footnote, mention your skills in patching security holes (assuming you have any) and offer to help them fix this hole, and potential other ones. Don't mention money in your initial email.
If you tell them upfront that you want $$$ to fix the hole, it's going to sound an awful lot like extortion. What you might think of as a friendly e-mail offering help, they could see as "Pay me $$$ and this/further vulnerabilities won't get released to the blackhats". So just treat them nicely, and hope for the same in return.
If they do sit on their asses for more than two weeks or so, it's probably alright to release the vulnerability to the public -- possibly anonymously if you fear retribution. Use tor/remailer if you have to publicly disclose and don't want BigCorp harassing you forever. They may suspect it was you who disclosed the vulnerability, but all they would have is a hunch. Good luck.
You'd be amazed at where life can exist. Coincidentally, just a week ago they found bacteria living 2.8km down in a mine, that also fueled speculation of 'life on Mars'.
Some really cool critters we've known about for a while exist in the Deep Sea ocean vents, and subsist off the chemicals coming through the cracks in the Earth's crust. Another one people didn't hear too much about were bacteria that lived on top of the Surveyor 3 craft that went to the moon and back with the Apollo 11 crew, and basically survived for 3 years in space on nothing. (I remember this stuff because I wrote a paper on the feasibility of life on a planet without a Sun.)
I don't see why there's so much defense of the WMA format, even if it doesn't have DRM turned on. It's not an open standard (unlike AAC, which is what iTunes rips to by default). According to Wikipedia, it's only due to the brilliance of reverse engineers at Real and FFmpeg that one is able to play WMA at all on *nix. And there's no guarantee on how long that'll last before MS "modifies the format for better compression" or some other BS. Stay the hell away from WMA, DRM or no.
I know this "Male Pill" at best won't hit the market for a few years, and possibly never will.. but just in case some of you have been living under rocks for the past 20 years, and take the 'Insightful' parent seriously -- Don't have unprotected sex with strangers. Wear a condom. You might have heard of STDs, though the topic doesn't seem to come up on /. very often for some reason.
If you know that both you and your lady have recently tested clean, then you can start worrying about birth control or Male Pill or whatnot.
Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux? Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap? According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?
And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with
Any social network founder that's willing to pass up $100 per user is "seriously disconnected from reality". In order to earn that much in ad revenue per user, each user would have to click ~400 ads over the site's lifetime assuming a very generous 25 cents/click. That, or you have to assume exponential growth of users will continue indefinitely. Riiight. And I don't even want to know what their bandwidth bills are like for all the images they host. I seem to remember this business model from a few years ago...
Easy! They're going to change their name to LinOSX, and wait. Another, oh, $25M should tide them over for a while~
Just so you know, LabVIEW is in fact offered for Linux. I'm forced to use it on Windows myself, but I'm seriously thinking about switching our lab's measurement comps to Linux for ease of scripting, stability, etc.
The Nokia 770 is, from what I can tell, just short of incredible -- runs Linux, nice big screen, and they've just released a new firmware. Only trouble is, for some mysterious reason, despite advertising the 770 on CNN, Nokia has strangled the supply of them. I'm absolutely baffled why they'd do this, but check Froogle -- the only place in the US that has them in stock for a non-inflated price is TigerDirect (the AdminPal link on Froogle is misleading), and for a price of $380+shipping, a bit steep for a tablet that's more than a year old now. I've looked in vain for a B&M store carrying them. CompUSA had them listed previously for $350 with free shipping, but they were never ever in stock for either delivery or in-store pickup anywhere in the country.
Even Nokia's USA page has listed them as being out of stock for at least the past few weeks. I'm a bit baffled why Nokia would do this to a product that has such huge geek appeal and a lot of grassroots FOSS software ported to it. My only hypothesis is that the US cellular companies that Nokia's in bed with are trying to push their bullshit data plans, and aren't happy about the emergence of tablets with WiFi that cuts them out of $50/month subscriptions.
Nokia, if you're listening, I'd been dying to snatch up a 770 for a reasonable price for the past few weeks, but due to your incompetence I'm settling for an Axim which is cheaper, faster, smaller.. but with Windows Mobile bullshit that offsets those advantages.
Indeed. I'd been initially very skeptical of any publication with the name "Christian Science Monitor".. until I read a few of their pieces. They're well-written, and actually very well respected, with good reason. Check the Wikipedia Article, they have almost no religious affiliation, great reporting (seven time Pulitzer winner), and stick their neck out for reporters on the line.
Also, off-topic a little, but if you live in or plan on visiting Boston anytime.. check out the Mapparium, which is located in a library belonging to the CSM. I wasn't too impressed by the thought of seeing what's essentially a really large globe until I actually got to go inside.. the acoustics alone are enough to take your breath away -- you can hear the faintest whisper along the inner diameter (a long way). Pictures don't do it the faintest justice, but here's one.