In a similar vein, Larry Wall's explanations of Perl warnings in the Camel Book are pretty amusing. Check out these gems:
illegal modulus zero You tried to divide a number by 0 to get the remainder. Most numbers don't take to this kindly.
gethostent not implemented Your C library apparently doesn't implement gethostent(3), probably because if it did, it'd feel morally obligated to return every hostname on the Internet. DNS tends to give machines a sense of grandeur.
goto must have label Unlike next or last, you're not allowed to goto an unspecified destination, the opinions of Elizabethans not withstanding. Go to goto.
>People are more cautious about opening random mail because SoBig is on the lose
This wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
If people aren't opening spam, then the 'click-through' rate (for want of a better word) drops sharply. I'm not sure, but I think people who send out a million spams get maybe 1000 sales within 48 hours, and if that number dropped too sharply they might hold off until the virus blew over. Hence less spam in your inbox.
>Inboxes are stuff full of viruses and anti-virus autoresponder messages, so that there's no room left for spam
This too wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
It's affecting who use webmail, e.g. admin workers in my organisation. So maybe not your personal inbox, no, but plenty of webmail inboxes, yes. And the people who use Hotmail may be among the best customers of spam.
(I know, I probably should have been a bit more detailed in my original post.)
Attention Slashdotters! This is a follow-up story, not a dupe. It even links to the older story. This new article is not about the Kiwi quitting spamming. Rather, it's about the noticeable drop in spam since he quit, and speculates that his story might have scared other spammers.
Of course, just after he quit Blaster and SoBig hit the net, so it's more likely that the drop in spam is linked to them, e.g.
People are more cautious about opening random mail because SoBig is on the lose
Inboxes are stuff full of viruses and anti-virus autoresponder messages, so that there's no room left for spam
I'd strongly recommend the foil-packed Dilmah (100% ceylon) variety, which is about the freshest, and most fragrant I've been able to fine in Australia.
Have you noticed that Mr Dilmah uses every available surface of the tea packet to write about how his competitors are out to get him? Check the lid flaps, bottom of the box, check under the packet for a tiny pamphlet etc -- the man is a paranoid nutter! It's probably foil-packed with pieces of his hat!
I'm running Debian Sparc at the moment, but finding it a bit l337 for my liking. I just want something that I can write code on and that my flatmates can use to surf the web, word process etc.
I don't think this is going to overtake RedHat any day soon, but it's good news for me and people in a similar situation. I've been having lots of trouble getting Linux working on my Sparc Ultra 5, because everything is optimised for 32-bit i86 platforms. I'd would love to have the goodness of Linux optimised for my lovely Sun hardware. Sun's problem was always the software rather than the hardware, and this looks like the best of both worlds.
Now imagine that there are 60,000 people doing the exact same thing that you are. The situation changes slightly.
True enough, but 60,000 folks small arms are still not enough to beat the US armed forces (see: Iraq). For such a revolt to be successful it would need huge popular support, millions of people rather than thousands. And at that point probably you'd have portions of the army going over to your side etc.
Further to that, if your popular support doesn't extend to a majority of citizens, then there's a strong case that your revolt lacks a popular mandate. Overthrowing the government with majority support is liberation, doing so without is little more than a coup.
Unless you have majority support, I can't see a situation in which the public having small arms promotes freedom. And if you do have true majority support, you probably won't need the small arms as you'll have regular forces.
I think the right to bear arms is well-intentioned, but just hasn't scaled properly to the present day, and is doing more harm than good at the moment.
I saw this, which is a new story but not on the front page.
Some stories are considered interesting enough for a subsection, but not of broad enough interest to make the front page. Read the Slashdot FAQ entry for more info.
The point being, at an ATM you would be required to look directly at the camera where the machine could get a relatively "straight-on" scan of your face. That would be immensely better than how they were trying to use it
The police here already do this. The place I used to work for built a 'Most Wanted' website for the cops, and a lot of the mugshots on the site were very clear face shots taken by ATM cameras behind the glass.
So, it's not quite automatically calling the cops just yet, but hooking a facial recognition system up to the ATM network would be quite workable in my opinion.
I could care less about having a gun for my personal civil protection. The chances of me getting to a firearm before a criminal shot me are next to nothing. But the fact of the matter is, we don't trust our Government.
Having an abundance of small arms didn't help David Koresh and Co in the Waco siege.
(This is not a troll, BTW -- whatever you think of Koresh, the fact was he tried to fight the government using the small arms he had the right to bear, and it didn't work.)
I live is Australia where the mains is 240 volts, and I have an amateur electrician story of my own.
Many years ago when I was young(er) and (more) foolish, I got work for a day demolishing a cafe for a shady cost-cutting landlord by the name of Andy. Andy and I got a bunch of tools and went in there and started smashing shit up, just laying into tables and cabinets etc with a crowbar.
Anyway, Andy reckons that the coffee machine might be valuable so he decides to remove it rather than smash it. He unscrews the water hose first, but the main tap is still on and he's quickly drenched and standing in a puddle (you can see where this is heading). He turns the water off at the mains then returns to the task at hand, removing the coffee machine. Having taken care of the water and unscrewed everything, there's only one thing left to do: unplug the machine. The plug and socket turn out to be sealed inside the wall cavity, so Andy figures he'll cut the power cable with a pair of tin snips and put a new plug on the coffee machine later.
He's pretty sure he got his electrician, Rob, to turn off the mains power earlier, but since he's standing in a puddle of water he wants to be 100% sure. He gets out his mobile phone and calls Rob, who assures him that the power is off and Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. At this point my spider sense is tingling badly, so I go and stand on top of a nice dry pile of wooden furniture while he cuts the cable.
There is a quiet snipping noise, then a bright flash of white light and a crack like thunder. Andy flies through the air, still holding the snips, and comes to rest in a pile of masonry. I go over to see if he's okay and notice that the blades of the snips have vaporised, leaving only a pair of rubber handles.
Andy opens his eyes, sits bolt upright and calls Rob on his mobile phone. The conversation goes like this:
If you're interested in firewire audio you should check out the mLan standard, which does power + MIDI + multitrack audio over a single cable. Yamaha and PreSonius both have mLan gear in the shops now (mixing desks, permaps etc).
Something a lot of folks are missing here is that search engines are used in applications, intranets, individual sites etc as well as Google type whole-internet portals.
When you click on 'Find Files' in Windows, or look for a song in your chosen P2P app, or look something up on your O'Reilly CD Bookshelf, or search/. for an old article, that's a using a search engine just as much as Google is.
If you're interested in something for your own project, lucene is a great application-centric search engine. It's just a bunch of Java classes that you call from your application. Or you can use a website-centric engine such as htdig if you're dealing with an intranet or website rather than an app.
They're both GPLed I think.
I used to think that blogs had little impact and were not real journalism, until I read Dear Raed by Salam Pax. This, for me, was most objective reporting on the US-Iraq war.
Salam now has a column in The Guardian, which AFIAK makes him the first blogger to articulate to journalist status.
How many artists have the music industry ruined. Well look at Steve Wright and The Easybeats. They were headed to challenge to Beatles, but were ripped off every step of the way till Wright decided to wait out his contract, but never made a come back.
I'll give you the Jakob Nielsen-approved end user stream of conciousness surf through your site...
I started on www.rwcinc.net/freerealty, which I at first thought was a news page but later figured out was a sort of changelog / download page. I had a look around for install instructions thinking I might do a test install, but couldn't find any on the page.
Looking for an overview I next clicked on 'upcoming features', but found it to be a bit developer specific. (As in I would grok it if I were familiar with the source but couldn't infer much about the software as a casual visitor, except that it uses images and a db).
After that I tried 'about this server' (thinking perhaps that the software was somehow server related, or that it needed to run on top of a specific server setup). For about half a second I thought I was looking at the system requirements for the software, then I realised it was a actually a blurb about the machine serving the website.
Next I tried 'demo site', thinking I could perhaps find a demo version of the software alongside install instructions. I stared at the page blankly for a bit then finally figured out that the software was some type of content management thingy for real estate listings.
Suggestions:
Add an FAQ ('what is FR', 'who is FR aimed at', 'what's the difference between FR and OpenRealty', 'how do I get the latest version', 'how do I install', 'what are system requirements' etc)
Change the wording 'demo site' to something like 'view a sample site powered by FreeRealty'
Maybe have a plain English analogue of 'upcoming features' ('in 2.9 you [the end user] will be able to do x, y, and z')
I feel like the archetypal clueless user after all that. It's nice to see someone caring about the usability of their site, though, so it's work the loss of geek points.
There is a verb form also: 'to effect change' etc. (Which is quite different from affecting change... the former brings about change whereas the latter influences said change).
Slashdot Mirror
You tried to divide a number by 0 to get the remainder. Most numbers don't take to this kindly.
Your C library apparently doesn't implement gethostent(3), probably because if it did, it'd feel morally obligated to return every hostname on the Internet. DNS tends to give machines a sense of grandeur.
Unlike next or last, you're not allowed to goto an unspecified destination, the opinions of Elizabethans not withstanding. Go to goto.
It's the political equivalent of Dilbert, but with a PM instead of a PHB...
Swish!
>People are more cautious about opening random mail because SoBig is on the lose
This wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
If people aren't opening spam, then the 'click-through' rate (for want of a better word) drops sharply. I'm not sure, but I think people who send out a million spams get maybe 1000 sales within 48 hours, and if that number dropped too sharply they might hold off until the virus blew over. Hence less spam in your inbox.
>Inboxes are stuff full of viruses and anti-virus autoresponder messages, so that there's no room left for spam
This too wouldn't change the amount of spam in my inbox...
It's affecting who use webmail, e.g. admin workers in my organisation. So maybe not your personal inbox, no, but plenty of webmail inboxes, yes. And the people who use Hotmail may be among the best customers of spam.
(I know, I probably should have been a bit more detailed in my original post.)
Of course, just after he quit Blaster and SoBig hit the net, so it's more likely that the drop in spam is linked to them, e.g.
I think I did this once at an 18th birthday party. Woke up under a pool table in a puddle of ham and pineapple pizza vomit. Never again!
I'd strongly recommend the foil-packed Dilmah (100% ceylon) variety, which is about the freshest, and most fragrant I've been able to fine in Australia.
Have you noticed that Mr Dilmah uses every available surface of the tea packet to write about how his competitors are out to get him? Check the lid flaps, bottom of the box, check under the packet for a tiny pamphlet etc -- the man is a paranoid nutter! It's probably foil-packed with pieces of his hat!
Nice tea, tho'.
Haven't you heard of Aurora Linux?
Nope. Got a link for the poor n00b?
I'm running Debian Sparc at the moment, but finding it a bit l337 for my liking. I just want something that I can write code on and that my flatmates can use to surf the web, word process etc.
I don't think this is going to overtake RedHat any day soon, but it's good news for me and people in a similar situation. I've been having lots of trouble getting Linux working on my Sparc Ultra 5, because everything is optimised for 32-bit i86 platforms. I'd would love to have the goodness of Linux optimised for my lovely Sun hardware. Sun's problem was always the software rather than the hardware, and this looks like the best of both worlds.
Now imagine that there are 60,000 people doing the exact same thing that you are. The situation changes slightly.
True enough, but 60,000 folks small arms are still not enough to beat the US armed forces (see: Iraq). For such a revolt to be successful it would need huge popular support, millions of people rather than thousands. And at that point probably you'd have portions of the army going over to your side etc.
Further to that, if your popular support doesn't extend to a majority of citizens, then there's a strong case that your revolt lacks a popular mandate. Overthrowing the government with majority support is liberation, doing so without is little more than a coup.
Unless you have majority support, I can't see a situation in which the public having small arms promotes freedom. And if you do have true majority support, you probably won't need the small arms as you'll have regular forces.
I think the right to bear arms is well-intentioned, but just hasn't scaled properly to the present day, and is doing more harm than good at the moment.
I saw this, which is a new story but not on the front page.
Some stories are considered interesting enough for a subsection, but not of broad enough interest to make the front page. Read the Slashdot FAQ entry for more info.
They probably hired the guy that did the /. games section design : )
The point being, at an ATM you would be required to look directly at the camera where the machine could get a relatively "straight-on" scan of your face. That would be immensely better than how they were trying to use it
The police here already do this. The place I used to work for built a 'Most Wanted' website for the cops, and a lot of the mugshots on the site were very clear face shots taken by ATM cameras behind the glass.
So, it's not quite automatically calling the cops just yet, but hooking a facial recognition system up to the ATM network would be quite workable in my opinion.
I could care less about having a gun for my personal civil protection. The chances of me getting to a firearm before a criminal shot me are next to nothing. But the fact of the matter is, we don't trust our Government.
Having an abundance of small arms didn't help David Koresh and Co in the Waco siege.
(This is not a troll, BTW -- whatever you think of Koresh, the fact was he tried to fight the government using the small arms he had the right to bear, and it didn't work.)
You may the be the first ever /. grammar nazi who can spell the word 'grammar' properly.
Three cheers!
Goggle him for more info.
Ach! My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
I live is Australia where the mains is 240 volts, and I have an amateur electrician story of my own.
Many years ago when I was young(er) and (more) foolish, I got work for a day demolishing a cafe for a shady cost-cutting landlord by the name of Andy. Andy and I got a bunch of tools and went in there and started smashing shit up, just laying into tables and cabinets etc with a crowbar.
Anyway, Andy reckons that the coffee machine might be valuable so he decides to remove it rather than smash it. He unscrews the water hose first, but the main tap is still on and he's quickly drenched and standing in a puddle (you can see where this is heading). He turns the water off at the mains then returns to the task at hand, removing the coffee machine. Having taken care of the water and unscrewed everything, there's only one thing left to do: unplug the machine. The plug and socket turn out to be sealed inside the wall cavity, so Andy figures he'll cut the power cable with a pair of tin snips and put a new plug on the coffee machine later.
He's pretty sure he got his electrician, Rob, to turn off the mains power earlier, but since he's standing in a puddle of water he wants to be 100% sure. He gets out his mobile phone and calls Rob, who assures him that the power is off and Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong. At this point my spider sense is tingling badly, so I go and stand on top of a nice dry pile of wooden furniture while he cuts the cable.
There is a quiet snipping noise, then a bright flash of white light and a crack like thunder. Andy flies through the air, still holding the snips, and comes to rest in a pile of masonry. I go over to see if he's okay and notice that the blades of the snips have vaporised, leaving only a pair of rubber handles.
Andy opens his eyes, sits bolt upright and calls Rob on his mobile phone. The conversation goes like this:
"Hello?"
"YOU'RE FIRED ARSEHOLE!"
Bwah ah ha ha ha! If had mod points I would shower you with them...
If you're interested in firewire audio you should check out the mLan standard, which does power + MIDI + multitrack audio over a single cable. Yamaha and PreSonius both have mLan gear in the shops now (mixing desks, permaps etc).
Something a lot of folks are missing here is that search engines are used in applications, intranets, individual sites etc as well as Google type whole-internet portals.
/. for an old article, that's a using a search engine just as much as Google is.
When you click on 'Find Files' in Windows, or look for a song in your chosen P2P app, or look something up on your O'Reilly CD Bookshelf, or search
If you're interested in something for your own project, lucene is a great application-centric search engine. It's just a bunch of Java classes that you call from your application. Or you can use a website-centric engine such as htdig if you're dealing with an intranet or website rather than an app. They're both GPLed I think.
I used to think that blogs had little impact and were not real journalism, until I read Dear Raed by Salam Pax. This, for me, was most objective reporting on the US-Iraq war.
Salam now has a column in The Guardian, which AFIAK makes him the first blogger to articulate to journalist status.
Further to this, most lightgun games can't handle high TV refresh rates. Time Crisis 2 won't work on a 100Hz CRT, for example.
How many artists have the music industry ruined. Well look at Steve Wright and The Easybeats. They were headed to challenge to Beatles, but were ripped off every step of the way till Wright decided to wait out his contract, but never made a come back.
They came back as AC/DC, didn't they?
I started on www.rwcinc.net/freerealty, which I at first thought was a news page but later figured out was a sort of changelog / download page. I had a look around for install instructions thinking I might do a test install, but couldn't find any on the page.
Looking for an overview I next clicked on 'upcoming features', but found it to be a bit developer specific. (As in I would grok it if I were familiar with the source but couldn't infer much about the software as a casual visitor, except that it uses images and a db).
After that I tried 'about this server' (thinking perhaps that the software was somehow server related, or that it needed to run on top of a specific server setup). For about half a second I thought I was looking at the system requirements for the software, then I realised it was a actually a blurb about the machine serving the website.
Next I tried 'demo site', thinking I could perhaps find a demo version of the software alongside install instructions. I stared at the page blankly for a bit then finally figured out that the software was some type of content management thingy for real estate listings.
Suggestions:
- Add an FAQ ('what is FR', 'who is FR aimed at', 'what's the difference between FR and OpenRealty', 'how do I get the latest version', 'how do I install', 'what are system requirements' etc)
- Change the wording 'demo site' to something like 'view a sample site powered by FreeRealty'
- Maybe have a plain English analogue of 'upcoming features' ('in 2.9 you [the end user] will be able to do x, y, and z')
I feel like the archetypal clueless user after all that. It's nice to see someone caring about the usability of their site, though, so it's work the loss of geek points.There is a verb form also: 'to effect change' etc. (Which is quite different from affecting change... the former brings about change whereas the latter influences said change).