Heh, I appear to be a chromatic yes-man today. I run GNU/Linux for two reasons:
(1) It's Free-as-in-Guns-Against-Tyrants. (2) I prefer to produce my product (code) at something like 4x the speed/efficiency I was seeing under Windows. The productivity gains I've made since switching back to Linux have allowed me to jump ship from my old employer and make as much money in 15 hours of freelance/contract work doing Ruby as I made in 60 hours (in a 40 hour week of course) doing.NET in a windows environment. This is directly related to my ability to easily customize my machine for a specific task, and the level of control I have there borders on overwhelming at time. At one point, when I was doing mostly coding and not as much business work with my startup (independent of the contract work I mentioned earlier), I used ratpoison as the WM for a two-week codeathon. It took maybe ten minutes to set up my computer as not a generic computer but a finely tuned coding tool. Vim+screen >> VS200x, oh gawd.
I don't know...I'd love to see a society in which the majority of people understood that computers are more than expensive typewriters with radios taped on. Such a society needs powerful tools. More powerful tools will be made when more people run the GNU stack, a true POSIX layer, etc. They don't have to know the acronyms, but when people go: 'Spend $999. Double click photoshop icon. Wait, watch loading screen. Open up image. Resize. Save macro. Apply to directory.' instead of using ImageMagick's CLI tools and being done with it, I feel like we need to help society understand how stupid they're being.
It seems more than likely that for a user in the near future, it's "Can I use Google Earth v3 speedily and pan and zoom around an extremely high resolution object quickly" which is far more about addressable memory than documents. Documents are done. We understand this. They aren't the next killer app. But something is, and it will address large amounts of memory. We can do more with more memory, and so we will. And it will be Good.
IE7s only nice feature is its out-of-the-box fullscreen mode. I use an extension to get Firefox to work like this, and I did so before I had a clue about how IE7 worked. I just noticed it on a buddy's computer the other day, and KUDOS TO MICROSOFT. They got something right. (For those that bitch when people talk about how braindead microsoft is, please take a look at.NET's CheckBoxList object and tell me how much sense it makes to iterate through the list to get the collection of checked items. That's not a framework.)
Firefox renders web standards better and faster than IE7 (the 'better' is empirical, the 'faster' is based on my observation but I haven't actually timed it). It is the superior browser qua browser. If you can in any way show IE7 to be superior on technical merit than FF, I'd love to hear it. I mean this in the literal sense, and not the time-worn argumentative sense. I'm a programmer and typically an empiricist, and if it's technically superior I want to know about it. So far I think it's got the fullscreen stuff going for it and its tab expose-a-like going for it, and I think as far as HCI goes it's a touch on the stupid side. The blank tab means a new tab? That's way more intuitive than a picture of a tab with a plus on it, honest.
Oh bah, names are names are names are pointless. Names are hats.
If people liked what Vorbis did, they'd learn to say Vorbis. If people were shown Vorbis, they'd like what it did. It comes down to a marketing problem, and that marketing problem is hard to solve, because Apple and MS are spending a/whole/ lot of money on their DAP products, specifically to provide a level of vendor lock-in.
There's absolutely no reason that MP3 rolls off the tongue. For one thing, it's an acronym standing for MPEG 1 Layer 3, which is a lot nastier sounding than 'Vorbis.' For another, I remember when MP3 compression first started happening, and if you'd like to go back then and look at people's faces when you said 'MP3' and tell me it sounded like butter, feel free.
Yeah, I'll have to agree with chromatic that most people don't NEED to know there are even options. But there's more than that.
My buddy recently installed Ubuntu (six months ago or so) at my prodding. Before the day he installed it he hadn't known Linux existed. He's not an extremely computer-savvy user, but I'd say he's on par with most college students I know (caveat: most college students I know are math or science folk. This guy isn't, he's a handyman and manages an apartment complex. YMMV.)
By the end of the week he understood Ubuntu very well (knew of some software that I didn't know about, and I run 4-6 linux machines in my home). He installed Edubuntu on a couple of spare PCs he had to provide to the kids at a Church that he helps at. All of the kids understood the machines as well, but this is still an aside...
Anyway, he had to ask about the terminology with GNOME/KDE, and he didn't necessarily understand the non-suite software still being written for GNOME or KDE, etc. But he could switch between them, and he knew the differences intuitively. He switched over to KDE in the second week I think. He referred to it as 'Kubuntu' and still does frequently, because it's what he knows. But as Feynman's dad pointed out to him, names are idiotic to memorize, and essentials matter. He got the essentials, and I think he is representative of a HUGE market segment.
Windows isn't a tool. I can look at my shovel and make another based on the principle (pointy end goes in the ground, right?).
If I look at Windows and make another based on its functioning principle, they send me to jail and everyone's taught that I'm an evil hacker. (Replace Windows with WMV, H.232, wtf-ever). Tools aren't IP.
However, in other definitions, I suppose windows *users* are tools...
P.S. - I kid. I have a single windows machine. Its primary purpose is to stream music using Logitech's Music Anywhere USB stuff to my home theater receiver. I have a media center hooked up in there, and I used to control it remotely to handle that stuff. These days, I use the win machine in my bedroom to listen to my music, over GNUMP3d streamed from said Ubuntu-based HTPC. If I want to walk outside with a buddy to talk, I can then close winamp, reroute the audio to the HT receiver, open winamp, and I'm playing the same song in another room. If I could figure out how to do this well without the Logitech hardware, I'd be extremely close to killing the windows box and moving all my graphic design work to Inkscape or something - except EPS/PDF reading support in graphic editing apps in linux blows as well.
Mod the parent up. This is an important point to understand. Hardware DRM could cripple our choices with Linux, for instance. Similarly (stretching it), if they came after me for watching my DVDs on my computer because they said it was illegal to do so, they'd have to shoot me before I let them take me out of my home, so the Linux user base would dwindle by one at least. I would hope others are willing to stand up for their own rights in this manner as well.
The userbase doesn't have to care about the free options. The open source vendors (RH, SuSE, Novell^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft, etc) would then be able to lobby on the part of the installed user base more effectively. That is, you only have to keep the vendors honest, not the users, in order to use leverage the way it's described in the paper.
Seriously, this is the language I suggest to every new programmer that asks me where to start, or to all my programmer friends who start to get burned out. I started to get burned out doing droll.NET work every day, and then I picked up Ruby. Since, I've quit my old job and picked up plenty enough consulting hours (in Ruby...the work's there. Especially in the Rails area) to pay for my living in about 15 hours of work a week (convenient, since I'm still taking my master's).
I took donations over to Ireland to set up a computer network for a Bible College there. I raised $10k or so in easily less than a week just by calling local businesses and asking for donations. I set it up so that they could donate to a local church and then the church funded me, so they got easy tax deduction without my having to set up a non-profit, etc.
So I'm saying literally start calling people around. I have a lot of practice raising donations by phone, but it's always a straightforward process. Make a list of those you wish to call, print out the giant table, and just start calling down it. Make notes by all the people as you call them each time, and it'll go by in no time.
Just how I would do it...the idea scales up just as easily to bigger donations.
Calling Google a 'Public Utility' has some consequences. If you accept that they are this 'public good,' then you're implicitly accepting that they are responsible to the people to keep it running, the state can intravene, etc. Maybe you don't take it that far, who knows. But this poster refers to de-indexing a spamming site without providing a reason as 'not aboveboard behaviour for a $157B company.' This would seem to imply that they did something wrong, right? And should be held accountable? Again, maybe he doesn't go that far, but do you see how absurd this becomes? Under this line of reasoning, if Google should be held accountable for de-indexing a site the indexing of which would taint their search results, then he's claiming that society should control their means of production. The only thing they produce is an across-the-boards excellent search engine. At least to any profit.
This reeks of socialism. I felt the tone of the post tended more towards 'this sort of thing should be illegal.' Maybe it just meant 'we should dislike them greatly for this.' In that case, I still feel it was ignorance, because they have to protect the search rankings. I love them because they help me search, not because they help this guy keep his traffic flowing until he lets his forums get overrun with tainted data.
So you choose, socialist or ignorant. But you have to see how it seems socialist if he meant the former.
Like it or not, Google has essentially become a Public Utility. Oh, come on. I'll agree with you that they aren't necessarily living up to the 'not evil' motto to the fullest for not mentioning something like this. At the same time, they're trying to give meaningful search results. They have more to worry about than talk.origins, and there are finite hours in the day, yeah? So maybe offload some of the discovery process on webmasters. Make them better citizens.
But no, Google does something unpleasant and all of the sudden Socialism rises again! Can't you people see that every time you start spouting socialist crap, anywhere, what you end up doing is devaluing the people you're trying to help? Was it really that hard to figure out that (a) something bad happened, traffic wise (logs will show a huge dip, right?), and (b) it happened somewhat concurrently with you letting your site become a spam breeding ground whose goal is to devalue the Google index? That's the most important property Google has...
If you think Google's a public good, then start bitching about the talk.origins webmaster polluting our public good with his spam links. But Google isn't a public good. It's a private venture, an excellently lucrative one, and we should all be thanking them for offering us the service and making enough money off of it to continue to offer it.
My senior year of high school I built a Tesla Coil that shot 27" sparks. It ran off of a 15kV/30mA neon sign transformer (so my max spark length should've been 36": 1.7*Math::sqrt(xfmr_kva) is a quick and dirty calculation that fits the data well). I built an MMC for that coil for the first time.
I'm building my second coil right now, five years later. I spent the whole of college (and the year I took off to live in Ireland) focused on programming and math, and not so much on the physics that I had loved playing with during high school. Now that that's all behind me (well, there's still at least a master's to go, right?) I can play again. So I'm constructing the MMC to handle a big old 220 military radar transformer (current best guess, still waiting to hear back from Raytheon to confirm) now, and this is going to push my second Tesla Coil. This MMC should provide 0.037uF at 19.2kV. I don't know how much current this transformer can handle, but assuming 300mA it could generate 124" sparks.
Finally, next week it is possible that I could pick up a transformer capable of doing ~15kV at 1.5A. For 255" max sparkage. Not sure, but if I get that transformer I'll either have a dominant new 'favorite thing I ever built' or a dramatically shortened life span.
"The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
What the hell? Why does he get to say what the people on that project are doing? I have no idea if it will end up being a good idea, and neither does he. All I know is that the amount that I was able to learn on a given day became basically unbounded on the day that my family got their first computer, and it's probably been the single most important learning tool I've ever used. That's why I became a programmer. That and because I get to make a lot of money for very little effort.
Still. This complaint is that the people making the OLPC could be doing something better. This coming from a guy who's spent HIS mindshare in life writing a bunch of occasionally-pointed articles (yeah, that's going to provide electricity more quickly, good thinking). It's easy to complain.
Now if it weren't Dvorak complaining - if my idol, Paul Graham, came out talking about how bad of an idea it was - I'd at least start to examine it. But if I listened every time Dvorak said something, I'd end up quite the idiot.
The economy will tell us whether this is a good idea. Not immediately, and it'll be an interesting example of a quasi-free market, since the only people involved in the market are about forty potential governments. Still, time will tell a lot better than MarketWatch.
*** HINT FOR IDIOTS - MAKE SURE YOU'RE LOGGED IN OR YOU WON'T GET CREDIT.
Seriously though, this was me...
Oh my, aren't Slashdot editors supposed to be able to parse English properly? Is it a bit too much for me to expect that of them? It's bad enough that no one RsTFA before commenting, but this is silly.
Plays for Sure devices aren't guaranteed to work with Zune-specific content. *** HINT FOR IDIOTS - THIS IS THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION
Now, children...can you tell the difference between that sentence and...
Zune devices aren't guaranteed to work with Plays for Sure-specific content. *** THIS IS WHAT YOU SEE WHEN YOU DON'T GO TO SCHOOL AND YOU TRY TO READ.
Would that I had mod points for this, the only commenter so far to take the time out of their busy WoW schedule to understand words.
Another good question - why is it inherently wrong to distribute the task of making copies? I was entitled to recover from a copy of my disc. I did so. The fact that I didn't make the copy doesn't change that I deserved my copy of windows.
Look at what their licensing requirements are doing to you. You're treating patterns of bits, a NUMBER, as if it were a physical thing. The whole digital revolution SHOULD be about how scarcity of many valuable things is *gone*. Instead they're trying to restrict these *numbers* more than physical things have ever been restricted.
A better analogy would have been 'This is like saying that you should be able to copy a friend's VHS because you lost yours!' See? More restrictions with the digital than with the analog - how does that make sense?
I can certainly download something that claim to be a copy of WMP11, but all I get is a pop-up complaining about WGA. Now, mind, I've got a license of windows. I can't find it. So I downloaded Windows XP. HELO Fair Use. Of course MS doesn't want me to see Media Player 11 because other people have stolen Windows from them.
In fairness, let me say that I have one Windows machine, and it exists almost entirely for Yahoo Music Player streaming into my living room, and for Counter-Strike on occasion. My other computers are all Ubuntu boxen, save the mac mini I got last week.
WGA = DRM = record players that won't play everyone's records. My Fair Use rights are being violated and no one will make it stop.
While I'm ranting, let me talk about the Angels & Airwaves CD. I had just explained DRM to my uncle for the first time when I picked up this album. On first seeing the actual disc, I was greeted with some 'SoundTone' or some such nonsense logo by the FBI warnings the media companies think I want cluttering up CD art. Knowing that RedBook is RedBook, I could only assume this had less to do with Sound or Tone and more to do with Fucking My Shit Up Because The Companies Know They Can. Sure enough, I popped it in and it wouldn't play.
When I bought that CD, I bought what was advertised as a RedBook disc. What I got was a $20 coaster that I can't use (because seriously, if I'm listening on my computer I'm not going to go searching for the disc). I have since vowed to download my music, because downloading leaves me feeling less like I got 0wned. I had stopped downloading music (remember the Yahoo Music mention?), and now they've reminded me why I should.
When I upgraded to Dapper on my development laptop (a primary machine of mine, since I travel to code frequently), it turned off halfway through the install. I thought to myself, dang, that was unlucky, and then proceeded to spend an entire day fixing the upgrade. I got it working, and perfectly, but it took a whole saturday.
Same. Thing. In. Eft. No way could it be my laptop's fault - plugged in and all. Anyway, it completed the upgrade but now when it boots it tells me that it doesn't have the sources installed for the current kernel (which is standard for the basic ubuntu install - I'm used to installing them afterwards). Anyway, it wants the sources to compile some module, and so my machine will not boot.
At any rate, right now I've got a 5.10 LiveCD in there, apt-got ssh, and I'm scping across my home directory to a mac mini I've got for posterity. Then I'm wiping the drive and separating my home dir into a different partition like I should have all along. Then the next upgrade will most certainly be a fresh install. Sigh. Restore my confidence, oh ubuntu masters.
I can verify this. My friend gets around 5KB/sec from security.ubuntu.com and 140K+ from all the other repositories / any other site that can saturate his download link.
It's not a problem with security.ubuntu.com, because I get around 400K/sec from it. My guess is just that Ubuntu's servers are somehow behind some particularly nasty other servers from his IP address, and maybe a lot of routes to the ubuntu servers go through these crappy servers?
I'll traceroute next time I'm over there if I think about it and compare it to my traceroute, see if we can't find the culprit. But yeah, I've noticed this too.
I think those are valid points...I *will* say that I was using metaForum for around a year in this basic format (with the mod-level slider) before slashcode saw the slider (well, slashdot...unsure if slashcode had it earlier), just so no one thinks it was ripped off:)
I'm one of the founders of RubyHam, Birmingham, AL's Ruby User's Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rubyham). Anyway, we currently use www.gatherplace.net to host our monthly-ish web meetings where we discuss various bits of the Ruby landscape, provide full-scale code examples, etc. It's Java-based, fwiw.
Pros: + Runs almost anywhere for connecting to the presentation + Host can transfer control of his computer to anyone + Host can make anyone else co-presenter (thus sharing THEIR desktop to all connected)
Cons: + Occasionally sluggish, but hey it's a function of my free processor cycles... + Linux users may not host the presentation
For something like what you're doing, VNC into a windows box, host the session, connect with the linux box, and make it co-presenter.
Couple this with skype or a dial-in conference line, and you're set.
I'm sure others have mentioned this already (didn't read child comments to your post), but can I just say that your mathematical open-mindedness is laudable? Thank God we've gotten past the point in human history where people think in terms of 'right answers' and 'wrong answers.' If you want 64 + 44 = 100, hell, who am I to make fun of you? LONG LIVE RELATIVISM!
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I appear to be a chromatic yes-man today. I run GNU/Linux for two reasons:
.NET in a windows environment. This is directly related to my ability to easily customize my machine for a specific task, and the level of control I have there borders on overwhelming at time. At one point, when I was doing mostly coding and not as much business work with my startup (independent of the contract work I mentioned earlier), I used ratpoison as the WM for a two-week codeathon. It took maybe ten minutes to set up my computer as not a generic computer but a finely tuned coding tool. Vim+screen >> VS200x, oh gawd.
(1) It's Free-as-in-Guns-Against-Tyrants.
(2) I prefer to produce my product (code) at something like 4x the speed/efficiency I was seeing under Windows. The productivity gains I've made since switching back to Linux have allowed me to jump ship from my old employer and make as much money in 15 hours of freelance/contract work doing Ruby as I made in 60 hours (in a 40 hour week of course) doing
I don't know...I'd love to see a society in which the majority of people understood that computers are more than expensive typewriters with radios taped on. Such a society needs powerful tools. More powerful tools will be made when more people run the GNU stack, a true POSIX layer, etc. They don't have to know the acronyms, but when people go: 'Spend $999. Double click photoshop icon. Wait, watch loading screen. Open up image. Resize. Save macro. Apply to directory.' instead of using ImageMagick's CLI tools and being done with it, I feel like we need to help society understand how stupid they're being.
Erm, I ranted. Sorry.
It seems more than likely that for a user in the near future, it's "Can I use Google Earth v3 speedily and pan and zoom around an extremely high resolution object quickly" which is far more about addressable memory than documents. Documents are done. We understand this. They aren't the next killer app. But something is, and it will address large amounts of memory. We can do more with more memory, and so we will. And it will be Good.
IE7s only nice feature is its out-of-the-box fullscreen mode. I use an extension to get Firefox to work like this, and I did so before I had a clue about how IE7 worked. I just noticed it on a buddy's computer the other day, and KUDOS TO MICROSOFT. They got something right. (For those that bitch when people talk about how braindead microsoft is, please take a look at .NET's CheckBoxList object and tell me how much sense it makes to iterate through the list to get the collection of checked items. That's not a framework.)
Firefox renders web standards better and faster than IE7 (the 'better' is empirical, the 'faster' is based on my observation but I haven't actually timed it). It is the superior browser qua browser. If you can in any way show IE7 to be superior on technical merit than FF, I'd love to hear it. I mean this in the literal sense, and not the time-worn argumentative sense. I'm a programmer and typically an empiricist, and if it's technically superior I want to know about it. So far I think it's got the fullscreen stuff going for it and its tab expose-a-like going for it, and I think as far as HCI goes it's a touch on the stupid side. The blank tab means a new tab? That's way more intuitive than a picture of a tab with a plus on it, honest.
Try Ubuntu. My menu looks like:
Applications -> Office -> Word Processor
Oh bah, names are names are names are pointless. Names are hats.
/whole/ lot of money on their DAP products, specifically to provide a level of vendor lock-in.
If people liked what Vorbis did, they'd learn to say Vorbis. If people were shown Vorbis, they'd like what it did. It comes down to a marketing problem, and that marketing problem is hard to solve, because Apple and MS are spending a
There's absolutely no reason that MP3 rolls off the tongue. For one thing, it's an acronym standing for MPEG 1 Layer 3, which is a lot nastier sounding than 'Vorbis.' For another, I remember when MP3 compression first started happening, and if you'd like to go back then and look at people's faces when you said 'MP3' and tell me it sounded like butter, feel free.
Yeah, I'll have to agree with chromatic that most people don't NEED to know there are even options. But there's more than that.
My buddy recently installed Ubuntu (six months ago or so) at my prodding. Before the day he installed it he hadn't known Linux existed. He's not an extremely computer-savvy user, but I'd say he's on par with most college students I know (caveat: most college students I know are math or science folk. This guy isn't, he's a handyman and manages an apartment complex. YMMV.)
By the end of the week he understood Ubuntu very well (knew of some software that I didn't know about, and I run 4-6 linux machines in my home). He installed Edubuntu on a couple of spare PCs he had to provide to the kids at a Church that he helps at. All of the kids understood the machines as well, but this is still an aside...
Anyway, he had to ask about the terminology with GNOME/KDE, and he didn't necessarily understand the non-suite software still being written for GNOME or KDE, etc. But he could switch between them, and he knew the differences intuitively. He switched over to KDE in the second week I think. He referred to it as 'Kubuntu' and still does frequently, because it's what he knows. But as Feynman's dad pointed out to him, names are idiotic to memorize, and essentials matter. He got the essentials, and I think he is representative of a HUGE market segment.
Windows isn't a tool. I can look at my shovel and make another based on the principle (pointy end goes in the ground, right?).
If I look at Windows and make another based on its functioning principle, they send me to jail and everyone's taught that I'm an evil hacker. (Replace Windows with WMV, H.232, wtf-ever). Tools aren't IP.
However, in other definitions, I suppose windows *users* are tools...
P.S. - I kid. I have a single windows machine. Its primary purpose is to stream music using Logitech's Music Anywhere USB stuff to my home theater receiver. I have a media center hooked up in there, and I used to control it remotely to handle that stuff. These days, I use the win machine in my bedroom to listen to my music, over GNUMP3d streamed from said Ubuntu-based HTPC. If I want to walk outside with a buddy to talk, I can then close winamp, reroute the audio to the HT receiver, open winamp, and I'm playing the same song in another room. If I could figure out how to do this well without the Logitech hardware, I'd be extremely close to killing the windows box and moving all my graphic design work to Inkscape or something - except EPS/PDF reading support in graphic editing apps in linux blows as well.
Mod the parent up. This is an important point to understand. Hardware DRM could cripple our choices with Linux, for instance. Similarly (stretching it), if they came after me for watching my DVDs on my computer because they said it was illegal to do so, they'd have to shoot me before I let them take me out of my home, so the Linux user base would dwindle by one at least. I would hope others are willing to stand up for their own rights in this manner as well.
The userbase doesn't have to care about the free options. The open source vendors (RH, SuSE, Novell^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft, etc) would then be able to lobby on the part of the installed user base more effectively. That is, you only have to keep the vendors honest, not the users, in order to use leverage the way it's described in the paper.
I also always find the 'adam and eve couldn't have made everyone! We're so different!' claim a bit funny.
Heard of Mitochondrial Eve? (and yeah, this isn't aimed at the parent...just liked his post)
Ruby.
.NET work every day, and then I picked up Ruby. Since, I've quit my old job and picked up plenty enough consulting hours (in Ruby...the work's there. Especially in the Rails area) to pay for my living in about 15 hours of work a week (convenient, since I'm still taking my master's).
Seriously, this is the language I suggest to every new programmer that asks me where to start, or to all my programmer friends who start to get burned out. I started to get burned out doing droll
I took donations over to Ireland to set up a computer network for a Bible College there. I raised $10k or so in easily less than a week just by calling local businesses and asking for donations. I set it up so that they could donate to a local church and then the church funded me, so they got easy tax deduction without my having to set up a non-profit, etc.
So I'm saying literally start calling people around. I have a lot of practice raising donations by phone, but it's always a straightforward process. Make a list of those you wish to call, print out the giant table, and just start calling down it. Make notes by all the people as you call them each time, and it'll go by in no time.
Just how I would do it...the idea scales up just as easily to bigger donations.
Calling Google a 'Public Utility' has some consequences. If you accept that they are this 'public good,' then you're implicitly accepting that they are responsible to the people to keep it running, the state can intravene, etc. Maybe you don't take it that far, who knows. But this poster refers to de-indexing a spamming site without providing a reason as 'not aboveboard behaviour for a $157B company.' This would seem to imply that they did something wrong, right? And should be held accountable? Again, maybe he doesn't go that far, but do you see how absurd this becomes? Under this line of reasoning, if Google should be held accountable for de-indexing a site the indexing of which would taint their search results, then he's claiming that society should control their means of production. The only thing they produce is an across-the-boards excellent search engine. At least to any profit.
This reeks of socialism. I felt the tone of the post tended more towards 'this sort of thing should be illegal.' Maybe it just meant 'we should dislike them greatly for this.' In that case, I still feel it was ignorance, because they have to protect the search rankings. I love them because they help me search, not because they help this guy keep his traffic flowing until he lets his forums get overrun with tainted data.
So you choose, socialist or ignorant. But you have to see how it seems socialist if he meant the former.
But no, Google does something unpleasant and all of the sudden Socialism rises again! Can't you people see that every time you start spouting socialist crap, anywhere, what you end up doing is devaluing the people you're trying to help? Was it really that hard to figure out that (a) something bad happened, traffic wise (logs will show a huge dip, right?), and (b) it happened somewhat concurrently with you letting your site become a spam breeding ground whose goal is to devalue the Google index? That's the most important property Google has...
If you think Google's a public good, then start bitching about the talk.origins webmaster polluting our public good with his spam links. But Google isn't a public good. It's a private venture, an excellently lucrative one, and we should all be thanking them for offering us the service and making enough money off of it to continue to offer it.
You bunch of handout wanting pansies. Geez.
My senior year of high school I built a Tesla Coil that shot 27" sparks. It ran off of a 15kV/30mA neon sign transformer (so my max spark length should've been 36": 1.7*Math::sqrt(xfmr_kva) is a quick and dirty calculation that fits the data well). I built an MMC for that coil for the first time.
I'm building my second coil right now, five years later. I spent the whole of college (and the year I took off to live in Ireland) focused on programming and math, and not so much on the physics that I had loved playing with during high school. Now that that's all behind me (well, there's still at least a master's to go, right?) I can play again. So I'm constructing the MMC to handle a big old 220 military radar transformer (current best guess, still waiting to hear back from Raytheon to confirm) now, and this is going to push my second Tesla Coil. This MMC should provide 0.037uF at 19.2kV. I don't know how much current this transformer can handle, but assuming 300mA it could generate 124" sparks.
Finally, next week it is possible that I could pick up a transformer capable of doing ~15kV at 1.5A. For 255" max sparkage. Not sure, but if I get that transformer I'll either have a dominant new 'favorite thing I ever built' or a dramatically shortened life span.
-josh
Seriously?
"The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
What the hell? Why does he get to say what the people on that project are doing? I have no idea if it will end up being a good idea, and neither does he. All I know is that the amount that I was able to learn on a given day became basically unbounded on the day that my family got their first computer, and it's probably been the single most important learning tool I've ever used. That's why I became a programmer. That and because I get to make a lot of money for very little effort.
Still. This complaint is that the people making the OLPC could be doing something better. This coming from a guy who's spent HIS mindshare in life writing a bunch of occasionally-pointed articles (yeah, that's going to provide electricity more quickly, good thinking). It's easy to complain.
Now if it weren't Dvorak complaining - if my idol, Paul Graham, came out talking about how bad of an idea it was - I'd at least start to examine it. But if I listened every time Dvorak said something, I'd end up quite the idiot.
The economy will tell us whether this is a good idea. Not immediately, and it'll be an interesting example of a quasi-free market, since the only people involved in the market are about forty potential governments. Still, time will tell a lot better than MarketWatch.
*** HINT FOR IDIOTS - MAKE SURE YOU'RE LOGGED IN OR YOU WON'T GET CREDIT.
Seriously though, this was me...
Oh my, aren't Slashdot editors supposed to be able to parse English properly? Is it a bit too much for me to expect that of them? It's bad enough that no one RsTFA before commenting, but this is silly.
Plays for Sure devices aren't guaranteed to work with Zune-specific content. *** HINT FOR IDIOTS - THIS IS THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION
Now, children...can you tell the difference between that sentence and...
Zune devices aren't guaranteed to work with Plays for Sure-specific content. *** THIS IS WHAT YOU SEE WHEN YOU DON'T GO TO SCHOOL AND YOU TRY TO READ.
Would that I had mod points for this, the only commenter so far to take the time out of their busy WoW schedule to understand words.
Another good question - why is it inherently wrong to distribute the task of making copies? I was entitled to recover from a copy of my disc. I did so. The fact that I didn't make the copy doesn't change that I deserved my copy of windows.
Look at what their licensing requirements are doing to you. You're treating patterns of bits, a NUMBER, as if it were a physical thing. The whole digital revolution SHOULD be about how scarcity of many valuable things is *gone*. Instead they're trying to restrict these *numbers* more than physical things have ever been restricted.
A better analogy would have been 'This is like saying that you should be able to copy a friend's VHS because you lost yours!' See? More restrictions with the digital than with the analog - how does that make sense?
I can certainly download something that claim to be a copy of WMP11, but all I get is a pop-up complaining about WGA. Now, mind, I've got a license of windows. I can't find it. So I downloaded Windows XP. HELO Fair Use. Of course MS doesn't want me to see Media Player 11 because other people have stolen Windows from them.
In fairness, let me say that I have one Windows machine, and it exists almost entirely for Yahoo Music Player streaming into my living room, and for Counter-Strike on occasion. My other computers are all Ubuntu boxen, save the mac mini I got last week.
WGA = DRM = record players that won't play everyone's records. My Fair Use rights are being violated and no one will make it stop.
While I'm ranting, let me talk about the Angels & Airwaves CD. I had just explained DRM to my uncle for the first time when I picked up this album. On first seeing the actual disc, I was greeted with some 'SoundTone' or some such nonsense logo by the FBI warnings the media companies think I want cluttering up CD art. Knowing that RedBook is RedBook, I could only assume this had less to do with Sound or Tone and more to do with Fucking My Shit Up Because The Companies Know They Can. Sure enough, I popped it in and it wouldn't play.
When I bought that CD, I bought what was advertised as a RedBook disc. What I got was a $20 coaster that I can't use (because seriously, if I'm listening on my computer I'm not going to go searching for the disc). I have since vowed to download my music, because downloading leaves me feeling less like I got 0wned. I had stopped downloading music (remember the Yahoo Music mention?), and now they've reminded me why I should.
When I upgraded to Dapper on my development laptop (a primary machine of mine, since I travel to code frequently), it turned off halfway through the install. I thought to myself, dang, that was unlucky, and then proceeded to spend an entire day fixing the upgrade. I got it working, and perfectly, but it took a whole saturday.
Same. Thing. In. Eft. No way could it be my laptop's fault - plugged in and all. Anyway, it completed the upgrade but now when it boots it tells me that it doesn't have the sources installed for the current kernel (which is standard for the basic ubuntu install - I'm used to installing them afterwards). Anyway, it wants the sources to compile some module, and so my machine will not boot.
At any rate, right now I've got a 5.10 LiveCD in there, apt-got ssh, and I'm scping across my home directory to a mac mini I've got for posterity. Then I'm wiping the drive and separating my home dir into a different partition like I should have all along. Then the next upgrade will most certainly be a fresh install. Sigh. Restore my confidence, oh ubuntu masters.
I can verify this. My friend gets around 5KB/sec from security.ubuntu.com and 140K+ from all the other repositories / any other site that can saturate his download link.
It's not a problem with security.ubuntu.com, because I get around 400K/sec from it. My guess is just that Ubuntu's servers are somehow behind some particularly nasty other servers from his IP address, and maybe a lot of routes to the ubuntu servers go through these crappy servers?
I'll traceroute next time I'm over there if I think about it and compare it to my traceroute, see if we can't find the culprit. But yeah, I've noticed this too.
I think those are valid points...I *will* say that I was using metaForum for around a year in this basic format (with the mod-level slider) before slashcode saw the slider (well, slashdot...unsure if slashcode had it earlier), just so no one thinks it was ripped off :)
I'm one of the founders of RubyHam, Birmingham, AL's Ruby User's Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rubyham). Anyway, we currently use www.gatherplace.net to host our monthly-ish web meetings where we discuss various bits of the Ruby landscape, provide full-scale code examples, etc. It's Java-based, fwiw.
Pros:
+ Runs almost anywhere for connecting to the presentation
+ Host can transfer control of his computer to anyone
+ Host can make anyone else co-presenter (thus sharing THEIR desktop to all connected)
Cons:
+ Occasionally sluggish, but hey it's a function of my free processor cycles...
+ Linux users may not host the presentation
For something like what you're doing, VNC into a windows box, host the session, connect with the linux box, and make it co-presenter.
Couple this with skype or a dial-in conference line, and you're set.
I almost feel silly doing this...
2^4=16
16-1=15
15=3x5
I'm sure others have mentioned this already (didn't read child comments to your post), but can I just say that your mathematical open-mindedness is laudable? Thank God we've gotten past the point in human history where people think in terms of 'right answers' and 'wrong answers.' If you want 64 + 44 = 100, hell, who am I to make fun of you? LONG LIVE RELATIVISM!