Yes, beta is really surprisingly horrible, and i really hope classic will remain an option.
<conspiracy>i bet the GNAA infiltrated dice, and made them create beta! (what have they been up to, anyhow?</conspiracy>
That being said, may I recommend some kind of diplomatic hybrid solution?
- make slashdot's CSS not suck, so that it is easily skin-able. Let US come up with funky themes in CSS form - and we can bet you that 'classic' will be one of the first ones to appear
- make slashdot more reddit-esque in the sense that everything should be API-accessible. That way, if you want to add some oh-so-great feature, you can just add an API call, an someone will mangle the CSS to reflect that. Hopefully, many new slashdot reader apps will pop up (including a decent mobile one! something like 'reddit is fun', but for slashdot!)
- you want to make more money? add that reddit 'give gold' option. They really seem to be making money of that over there, and it goes along nicely with the whole "karma" economy that slashdot basically started. I mean: you've got us all working for you, indirectly, because we all come here for the comments, which are made by us. So give us some additional way of cheering at each other for doing a good job, and make some money off of it!
- unicode! Hell - i make my living writing perl, and basic unicode is really not THAT hard. Geeez.
- if you want to make the whole place more modern and dynamic, you can always add bells & whistles like (unobstrusive) auto-updates and all that jazz. Hell, some CSS themes could even incorporate those obnoxious, but "modern" jQuery animations!
What a coincidence!
I am getting ready to transition our main DB servers (couple of GB mysql data) to SSD, but I simply dont want to trust it that much yet. So my plan is to set up RAID-1, with an SSD and another conventional drive. There seems to be this "--write-mostly" option that tells linux to preferably read from the SSD.
Anybody know if this is worth it? If it works? What kind of random access performance gains can i look forward to, running mysql on SSD?
I found it surprisingly hard to find any good data on these subjects.
Even if half of this design works out as advertised, i think this would be awesome! Pity that the 'western world' wasn't interested in investing in it and trying it out....
I agree, most of all with your first step, because IMHO, the others more or less follow naturally from critical thinking.
The problem is that all the conspiracy-nuts insist that they are the sole owners of - what THEY call - 'critical thinking'.
Why is there no obligatory class called 'critical thinking' in schools? Should be really easy to implement, and could easily made fun, i think.
Actually in Germany we (used to?) have a similar law: it is legal to drive with relatively low BAC, and if you get stopped by a routine control operation, that's fine. But if you get stopped because your were driving in a way that might seem "adventurous" (stuff lke running a yellow light, speeding, weird manouvers) with the same low BAC level, you'd get fined.
I recently discovered a general list of unsolved problems, which I find fascinating. It's like a summary of the current limits of science and human knowledge and understanding.
TFA was ridiculous.
I just thought of an experiment:
Assuming your tinnitus is a near-constant frequency sine wave, what happens if you try to cancel the imaginary sound out using an external sound?
I have no idea whether it's even possible to try to sync soundwaves that exactly by hand/mind, but maybe you can hear/perceive some interference, at least?
I'm not saying that this could be a cure for tinnitus, but me, at least, would be fascinated if imaginary sounds can interfere and maybe even cancel out physical sounds...
On a related note: there used to be this nice open source skype-alternative (using SIP and all that) called openwengo, but i cant find it anymore. the company also offered a flash based SIP client (wengovisio), and a flash-based teleconferencing thing (wengomeetings), but i cant find any of them anymore. quite a pity.
a little side-rant: the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered. I know there are work-arounds, but i blame this NAT-unfriendliness for the rise of skype, and now we're stuck with that nonstandard closed protocol crap. I think it was the glorious idea of incorporating the IP addresses inside the SIP packets, or something like that. sigh.
on a related note: whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then. And what protocol is Google using for their video-chat in gmail?
try Gosmore. It's extremely(!) basic, but kinda works, once you figure out the controls. I;m using it on a very shitty Navigon unit here in Costa Rica. Little bonus: you can save you GPS traces, and add POIs, and then afterwards incorporate them back into the OSM database. There seem to be other programs, though
I am assuming that it's a 'regular' modem answering the call on the other side - could somebidy explain to me how the two can handshake and sync, then? I always thought that the handshake/syncing part would at least require a bit of 'intelligence' from the modems involved?
What the heck is wrong with HP, or specifically, with the morons that designed the dv6000 series, of which i am a 'proud' (meh!) owner?
This laptop had its internatl power circuitry fry (HP acknowledges this, and offers a free mail-in repair, even after warranty), the Wifi-mini-PCI card simply disappeared completely (under Windows and linux), and chooses to re-appear aprox. once a month (HP acknowledges this, and IIRC also offers a free off-warranty repair for this. Both of these symptoms happened to a friend's DV9000, too. And now the battery is a fire hazard? I know i am spoiled because my last laptop was a good old indestructible Thinkpad A30 (well, the GPU has some problems, but after so many years, i'd say that's forgivable). But i will be sure not to buy an HP again, until i hear some VERY good news about their engineering skills.
No.
AFAIK, the catholic church explicitly says that science and faith should not contradict one another. The only thing they 'cherry pick' as not being allowed as being a result from evolution is the human 'soul' (whatever that is). I think that this move was really smart, since even Neuroscientists and Cognitive Scientists have a bit of a problem defining what 'soul', 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' is supposed to be, exactly, so the catholic church at least delayed the next big phase of contradiction between science in faith for a long while, and will always be able to pull some philosophy-of-mind trick later on to reconcile the two.
I believe that any 'spiritual element' of the human beings logically must, of course, be an epiphenomenon of the hardware which in turn evolved naturally. But I still think that the Vatican's definition was a very smart move.
I think it's a lot less black-and-white than this:
I once heard a talk from an ex-Nazi in Germany, and - even though he admitted his and the german's guilt without restraint - tried to at least explain what was going on in the following way:
He said that, yes, when someone asks him why basically nobody did anything to stop the holocaust, the best way to describe it was to say "we didn't really know about it!". But it's a different form of 'not knowing'. Sure, one could see the train-transports going to the concentration camps. Or the rounding up of jews in cities. But it's a natural psychological (irrational) defense mechanism to SOMEHOW try to think that maybe they wont be killed or tortured. So he asked the audience what they would answer when, 50 years from now, our grandkids ask us why we didn't save the africans that get slaughtered every couple of years in some uprising or genocide. Sure - we certainly do 'know' about it. But it's a different kind of 'knowing', since we try to distanciate ourselves from this reality, because it's just to harsh once you really grok how screwed up this whole situation is. Better to tuck it a away in some dark corner of your mind, and try to ignore it. It's a bit like HHGTTG's 'Somebody elses problem field'.
my really un-geeky cousin did the geekiest, yet most romantic thing that i could think of: he signed up for a ring-making class, and made the (plain gold) rings himself, from scratch. I always thought this was the ideal solution to the problem of having a "special" ring, while at the same time not getting something that might seem "weird" to normal people. I'd love to do the same, but now i'd obviously just be a copy-cat:(
ages ago, Intel was nice enough to opensource their rather impressive computer vision library called OpenCV, which AFAIK would do the heavy lifting for programs like these. What i find strange is that i have yet to see a neat open source program that uses OpenCV - even though i think there's even a python binding to the library (but sadly no perl bindings). Anyone know of a neat biometrics software package, or computer vision in general, that is open source?
Could someone explain how they 'build' the images that depict the Milkyway, as seen from OUTSIDE the Milkyway, from these images? Do they actually have parralax measurements for each star, or do they use some frequency-shifts? And how did they do this aprox. 20 years ago, when they already had relativly exact images of the Milkyway, but technology was way more inferior?
I prefer InfraRecorder, as it has a IMNSHO a superior interface, and is actually open source. I always wondered why CDBurnerXP is more popular, or why so many people haven't heard of Infrarecorder.
try wengomeetingfor a flash-based videoconferencing tool (up to 5 participants) It's not open source, but the company (wengo) does offer an open source client for their other services.
This concept shouldn't be too hard to re-implement with an open source flash media server, like red5. but sadly, red5's documentation is severely lacking.
What i'd really love to have is a wristwatch that simply 'speaks' bluetooth, and lets me remote-control any compliant cell phone i have in my pocket. Additionaly, (and that's the catch), it would have to relay the phone's display onto it's own display, so i could use it to rudimentary surf the web, read SMS, use J2ME apps, etc. I wonder when this kind of interchangeable modularization will at last happen: the cell-phone will be the computing and communications module, the watch (or a micro-tablet-pc-like-thing) the display module, the headset the audio module, etc. It really doesn't sound so hard to implement (although i dont know of a bluetooth profile that could forward the display in an efficient manner), and this would IMHO really revolutionize the way that people could use mobile tech.
May i point out that the reverse (causation implies correlation) DOES hold true, and that the whole 'it's just a correlation!' shouting doesn't actually prove whether the study is bogus or not? It still is an interesting data-point, and as a cat-surviver myself, i can only attest to many calming effect a cat, and to a lesser effect a dog might be having on their slave and master, correspondingly. I'm not saying that cats directly reduce the risk of a heart attack, but i think it's interesting that it might be a relatively strong factor playing into the combination of stuff you can do to increase your life expectancy. It might be something as simple as the happiness or the pride that a cat can couse when she decides to honor you with her presence, and starts to purr.
And besides - weren't there a couple of studies that showed that pets in hospital have benificial effects on the patients?
I dated a lot of girls that were either religious or astrology-nuts, or where otherwise mentally misguided, but i keep on trying to get them to enter a serious discussion about this stuff they believe in, and get them to admit when they are being inconsistant in their beliefs. If they find a way to combine their irrational beliefs with the grand scheme of science (e.g. religion: god set down the basic rules, but doesn't influence us anymore, astrology: nice old tradition that gives guidance like a magic-8-ball gives guidance) i usually let them be. If they don't accept that their concepts are illogical, this usually indicates a very closed-minded and stubborn character to me, and these fundamental differences usually end up destroying the relationship in other indirect ways.
I know that i am not sounding too tolerant of religion and voodoo stuff, and might be calles closed-minded because of that, but i have logic on my side, so i insist that i am at the least right-er than people that have inconsistent world-views (and usually deny it)
Slashdot Mirror
The Costa Rican Colon is actually not directly pegged to the USD. It's a bit more complicated
Yes, beta is really surprisingly horrible, and i really hope classic will remain an option.
<conspiracy>i bet the GNAA infiltrated dice, and made them create beta! (what have they been up to, anyhow?</conspiracy>
That being said, may I recommend some kind of diplomatic hybrid solution?
- make slashdot's CSS not suck, so that it is easily skin-able. Let US come up with funky themes in CSS form - and we can bet you that 'classic' will be one of the first ones to appear
- make slashdot more reddit-esque in the sense that everything should be API-accessible. That way, if you want to add some oh-so-great feature, you can just add an API call, an someone will mangle the CSS to reflect that. Hopefully, many new slashdot reader apps will pop up (including a decent mobile one! something like 'reddit is fun', but for slashdot!)
- you want to make more money? add that reddit 'give gold' option. They really seem to be making money of that over there, and it goes along nicely with the whole "karma" economy that slashdot basically started. I mean: you've got us all working for you, indirectly, because we all come here for the comments, which are made by us. So give us some additional way of cheering at each other for doing a good job, and make some money off of it!
- unicode! Hell - i make my living writing perl, and basic unicode is really not THAT hard. Geeez.
- if you want to make the whole place more modern and dynamic, you can always add bells & whistles like (unobstrusive) auto-updates and all that jazz. Hell, some CSS themes could even incorporate those obnoxious, but "modern" jQuery animations!
There's a fascinating video on the "Solve For X" site that follows this Thorium advocate around. It's very convincing!
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/thorium-an-energy-solution-thorium-remix-2011
What a coincidence! I am getting ready to transition our main DB servers (couple of GB mysql data) to SSD, but I simply dont want to trust it that much yet. So my plan is to set up RAID-1, with an SSD and another conventional drive. There seems to be this "--write-mostly" option that tells linux to preferably read from the SSD. Anybody know if this is worth it? If it works? What kind of random access performance gains can i look forward to, running mysql on SSD? I found it surprisingly hard to find any good data on these subjects.
Here's Bill Gates' TED presentation on this project from almost 2 years ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
Even if half of this design works out as advertised, i think this would be awesome! Pity that the 'western world' wasn't interested in investing in it and trying it out....
I agree, most of all with your first step, because IMHO, the others more or less follow naturally from critical thinking.
The problem is that all the conspiracy-nuts insist that they are the sole owners of - what THEY call - 'critical thinking'.
Why is there no obligatory class called 'critical thinking' in schools? Should be really easy to implement, and could easily made fun, i think.
Actually in Germany we (used to?) have a similar law: it is legal to drive with relatively low BAC, and if you get stopped by a routine control operation, that's fine. But if you get stopped because your were driving in a way that might seem "adventurous" (stuff lke running a yellow light, speeding, weird manouvers) with the same low BAC level, you'd get fined.
Well, then they should've just nuked the site from orbit!
I recently discovered a general list of unsolved problems, which I find fascinating. It's like a summary of the current limits of science and human knowledge and understanding.
TFA was ridiculous.
I just thought of an experiment:
Assuming your tinnitus is a near-constant frequency sine wave, what happens if you try to cancel the imaginary sound out using an external sound?
I have no idea whether it's even possible to try to sync soundwaves that exactly by hand/mind, but maybe you can hear/perceive some interference, at least?
I'm not saying that this could be a cure for tinnitus, but me, at least, would be fascinated if imaginary sounds can interfere and maybe even cancel out physical sounds...
On a related note: there used to be this nice open source skype-alternative (using SIP and all that) called openwengo, but i cant find it anymore. the company also offered a flash based SIP client (wengovisio), and a flash-based teleconferencing thing (wengomeetings), but i cant find any of them anymore. quite a pity.
a little side-rant: the person that designed the SIP protocol in such an incredibly NAT-unfriendly manner should be drawn and quartered. I know there are work-arounds, but i blame this NAT-unfriendliness for the rise of skype, and now we're stuck with that nonstandard closed protocol crap. I think it was the glorious idea of incorporating the IP addresses inside the SIP packets, or something like that. sigh.
on a related note: whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then. And what protocol is Google using for their video-chat in gmail?
try Gosmore. It's extremely(!) basic, but kinda works, once you figure out the controls. I;m using it on a very shitty Navigon unit here in Costa Rica. Little bonus: you can save you GPS traces, and add POIs, and then afterwards incorporate them back into the OSM database.
There seem to be other programs, though
I am assuming that it's a 'regular' modem answering the call on the other side - could somebidy explain to me how the two can handshake and sync, then? I always thought that the handshake/syncing part would at least require a bit of 'intelligence' from the modems involved?
What the heck is wrong with HP, or specifically, with the morons that designed the dv6000 series, of which i am a 'proud' (meh!) owner?
This laptop had its internatl power circuitry fry (HP acknowledges this, and offers a free mail-in repair, even after warranty), the Wifi-mini-PCI card simply disappeared completely (under Windows and linux), and chooses to re-appear aprox. once a month (HP acknowledges this, and IIRC also offers a free off-warranty repair for this. Both of these symptoms happened to a friend's DV9000, too. And now the battery is a fire hazard? I know i am spoiled because my last laptop was a good old indestructible Thinkpad A30 (well, the GPU has some problems, but after so many years, i'd say that's forgivable). But i will be sure not to buy an HP again, until i hear some VERY good news about their engineering skills.
No.
AFAIK, the catholic church explicitly says that science and faith should not contradict one another. The only thing they 'cherry pick' as not being allowed as being a result from evolution is the human 'soul' (whatever that is). I think that this move was really smart, since even Neuroscientists and Cognitive Scientists have a bit of a problem defining what 'soul', 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' is supposed to be, exactly, so the catholic church at least delayed the next big phase of contradiction between science in faith for a long while, and will always be able to pull some philosophy-of-mind trick later on to reconcile the two.
I believe that any 'spiritual element' of the human beings logically must, of course, be an epiphenomenon of the hardware which in turn evolved naturally. But I still think that the Vatican's definition was a very smart move.
I think it's a lot less black-and-white than this:
I once heard a talk from an ex-Nazi in Germany, and - even though he admitted his and the german's guilt without restraint - tried to at least explain what was going on in the following way:
He said that, yes, when someone asks him why basically nobody did anything to stop the holocaust, the best way to describe it was to say "we didn't really know about it!". But it's a different form of 'not knowing'. Sure, one could see the train-transports going to the concentration camps. Or the rounding up of jews in cities. But it's a natural psychological (irrational) defense mechanism to SOMEHOW try to think that maybe they wont be killed or tortured. So he asked the audience what they would answer when, 50 years from now, our grandkids ask us why we didn't save the africans that get slaughtered every couple of years in some uprising or genocide. Sure - we certainly do 'know' about it. But it's a different kind of 'knowing', since we try to distanciate ourselves from this reality, because it's just to harsh once you really grok how screwed up this whole situation is. Better to tuck it a away in some dark corner of your mind, and try to ignore it. It's a bit like HHGTTG's 'Somebody elses problem field'.
The Mythbusters busted that one
my really un-geeky cousin did the geekiest, yet most romantic thing that i could think of: he signed up for a ring-making class, and made the (plain gold) rings himself, from scratch. I always thought this was the ideal solution to the problem of having a "special" ring, while at the same time not getting something that might seem "weird" to normal people. I'd love to do the same, but now i'd obviously just be a copy-cat :(
ages ago, Intel was nice enough to opensource their rather impressive computer vision library called OpenCV, which AFAIK would do the heavy lifting for programs like these. What i find strange is that i have yet to see a neat open source program that uses OpenCV - even though i think there's even a python binding to the library (but sadly no perl bindings). Anyone know of a neat biometrics software package, or computer vision in general, that is open source?
Could someone explain how they 'build' the images that depict the Milkyway, as seen from OUTSIDE the Milkyway, from these images? Do they actually have parralax measurements for each star, or do they use some frequency-shifts? And how did they do this aprox. 20 years ago, when they already had relativly exact images of the Milkyway, but technology was way more inferior?
I prefer InfraRecorder, as it has a IMNSHO a superior interface, and is actually open source. I always wondered why CDBurnerXP is more popular, or why so many people haven't heard of Infrarecorder.
try wengomeetingfor a flash-based videoconferencing tool (up to 5 participants)
It's not open source, but the company (wengo) does offer an open source client for their other services.
This concept shouldn't be too hard to re-implement with an open source flash media server, like red5. but sadly, red5's documentation is severely lacking.
What i'd really love to have is a wristwatch that simply 'speaks' bluetooth, and lets me remote-control any compliant cell phone i have in my pocket. Additionaly, (and that's the catch), it would have to relay the phone's display onto it's own display, so i could use it to rudimentary surf the web, read SMS, use J2ME apps, etc. I wonder when this kind of interchangeable modularization will at last happen: the cell-phone will be the computing and communications module, the watch (or a micro-tablet-pc-like-thing) the display module, the headset the audio module, etc. It really doesn't sound so hard to implement (although i dont know of a bluetooth profile that could forward the display in an efficient manner), and this would IMHO really revolutionize the way that people could use mobile tech.
May i point out that the reverse (causation implies correlation) DOES hold true, and that the whole 'it's just a correlation!' shouting doesn't actually prove whether the study is bogus or not? It still is an interesting data-point, and as a cat-surviver myself, i can only attest to many calming effect a cat, and to a lesser effect a dog might be having on their slave and master, correspondingly. I'm not saying that cats directly reduce the risk of a heart attack, but i think it's interesting that it might be a relatively strong factor playing into the combination of stuff you can do to increase your life expectancy. It might be something as simple as the happiness or the pride that a cat can couse when she decides to honor you with her presence, and starts to purr.
And besides - weren't there a couple of studies that showed that pets in hospital have benificial effects on the patients?
I dated a lot of girls that were either religious or astrology-nuts, or where otherwise mentally misguided, but i keep on trying to get them to enter a serious discussion about this stuff they believe in, and get them to admit when they are being inconsistant in their beliefs. If they find a way to combine their irrational beliefs with the grand scheme of science (e.g. religion: god set down the basic rules, but doesn't influence us anymore, astrology: nice old tradition that gives guidance like a magic-8-ball gives guidance) i usually let them be. If they don't accept that their concepts are illogical, this usually indicates a very closed-minded and stubborn character to me, and these fundamental differences usually end up destroying the relationship in other indirect ways.
I know that i am not sounding too tolerant of religion and voodoo stuff, and might be calles closed-minded because of that, but i have logic on my side, so i insist that i am at the least right-er than people that have inconsistent world-views (and usually deny it)