As for the answer to the question "are universities too careless with their data?" -- well, UCSB certainly was. Allowing passwords to be reset with just the SSN and birthdate was asking for trouble.
That sounds pretty odd. Nothing like the Wikipedia I know. How about linking to the edits you made, and the user talk page where you were warned to quit it? Your comment is almost like an accusation, so some evidence would appropriate.
If the government can take patents, why not farms? After all, poor people need to eat, and food makes up a significant portion of their budget. If the government owned all the farms, they could give food to poor people for free. Pretty soon, they wouldn't be poor anymore.
I really can't believe this story is being discussed calmly here. The application of "eminent domain" to patents is absolutely ridiculous. It's just state legislatures trying to expand their power and say what they think the voters would like to hear -- though it may be the most egregious example of government theft I've heard of (at this scale, in this country) in a very long time.
You are, in fact, saying that it is impossible to do better than a certain limit. By using the word "fundamentally", you have assigned a certainty to your assessment that is equivalent to a law of physics. That's not a good idea, because we are dealing in matters that are less precisely known than such things as the limiting efficiency of a thermodynamic engine.
Even worse, you appear to be aware of only two extremes: allowing anyone to contribute, or allowing only credentialed people to contribute. The discussion page I linked to above mentions several intermediate arrangements (and other, more creative solutions).
Don't mistake me: I am not saying "you are wrong, we can and will have our cake and eat it too." I am saying: you have no basis for your assumption that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. An attitude like that chokes off further development in areas where human knowledge is far from complete.
I really hate this attitude. Wikipedia is only about four years old, and you're ready to throw in the towel? The system is as good as it'll ever be?
The problem of maintaining accuracy without raising the bar to new contributors too high is being attacked from many different angles. Lots of ideas, some rather good, are being discussed. Some features have already crept into the software, and more are on the way.
Don't be like the patent office commissioner who assumed that everything that could be invented had been (well, not really... but you get my point).
Slackware users are libertarian (or even anarchist) control freaks. They react with hostility to any hint of a threat to their freedoms, and make do with a minimum of centralized control. They make friends slowly, and tend to keep them for a long, LONG time but can decisively say goodbye to any who betray them. They have very little tolerance for nonsense.
for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD
FreeBSD... seemed to "click together" better than Linux
All of your comparisons are between FreeBSD and Linux. Are you aware that the difference between distributions is large? As large as the difference between FreeBSD and Red Hat, and larger than the difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?
At 625 MB, you could fit the text of the current database on a CD. The images will jack it up another 3.6 GB. So you could reasonably fit the current revision on one DVD. If you also want the full record of changes and revisions, it's about 15 GB just for the text.
You can download this stuff easily, and it's obvious from recent Google searches that many people do.
You may not be aware of this, but the article you linked to is a copy of this one. In the interest of giving credit where it's due, you might want to give Wikipedia more exposure in the future.
Come to think of it, I never got a list of "thank yous" with my TiVo,
In all likelihood, my post points out a violation of the GPL. It doesn't constitute a defense for every inflammatory statement in this story's article.
and it doesn't constantly remind me of the socialist pile of crap
license that it's innards are licensed under every time I hit the TiVo button.
There's probably a big difference between a discrete message at startup time, and this sort of weird overkill. Luckily the GPL addresses this issue rather sensibly. I won't quote it for now, since we've had plenty of that already.
Instead of looking for reasons to beat on AOL, the "free" software community needs to be more vigilant in watching out for
offenses, instead of picking its enemies at random.
Are they in violation, or aren't they? Is there something you'd like to get off your chest?
I still haven't seen any proof that this device violates the GPL. It runs Linux, but so what? The GPL, as I understand it, doesn't
require you to do anything until you make modifications to GPL code, or use it in your own software,
Wrong. Take a look at the license sometime, it isn't too long. Here's a relevant excerpt for ya:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange;
In a nutshell: if you distribute the software, you have to provide the source.
Therefore, it would be necessary to keep track of 1,000,000,000,000 different md5 checksums (well, technically it's a little bit less than that, but you get the idea). I'm not sure that there are hard drives big enough to store all that data.
You wouldn't need that much space. Just calculate another md5 checksum starting at each byte position. So if the program is 1 MB, you'd need 32 MB of checksum data. That's a little more reasonable... it doesn't seem any more legal, though.
The likelihood that CT is using a browser that doesn't understand Unicode is remote. MSNBC is using a character set called Windows code page 1252, which is like the standard Latin-1 character set, except that it uses reserved positions for characters like smart quotes.
Modern browsers accept “ and ” for smart quotes, but Frontpage hasn't caught up yet...
You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.
So, in other words, "kiddie porn" is free speech.
This is a very wretched misparaphrase. Ian seems to be implying the exact opposite. His point is not that kiddie porn ought to be protected from censorship, but that Freenet will do so, due to its technical nature.
Seeing these characters myself, I extracted the codes and looked them up. The code I get where I expected the ASCII symmetrical apostrophe is actually the UNICODE right apostrophe.
What you extracted was character #146, a reserved character in ISO 8859-1 (the default character set for HTML). In Microsoft's character set, #146 is the right apostrophe.
It's sad, but in some ways, Microsoft is actually LEADING technology. In this case it is the adoption of UNICODE international character set. I wish the Unix/BSD/Linux community would get their act together and get these things working.
Bzzt. Try again. This is the unicode entity for a right single quote: ’
Browsers on Linux display it just fine, but they DON'T display Microsoft's proprietary replacement. The "Unix camp" is quite up to date in this regard. The problem is, as stated before, ignorant webmasters - who don't know that Microsoft's proprietary extensions are a Bad Thing, and worse still, don't understand that the proper character to use for an apostrophe is.. an apostrophe, character #39.
I remember a time, it was at least a couple of months ago, when I saw a few non-inflammatory anti-GPL posts moderated down as "Troll" or such. How terrible, I thought.
That sort of thing petered out fairly quickly. Within a couple of weeks, anti-GPL posts were no longer automatically moderated down, and a few were even moderated up. Perhaps metamoderation, clunky as it is, is working.
Obcomplaint: I haven't done anything to deserve a karma of 18. Any monkey can mark 95% of the moderations "fair".
Re:Windows is a brilliant piece of software
on
Managing Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Two or three people invent a brilliant piece of software, and then, five years later, 1,000 people do a bad job of following up on their idea. History is littered with projects that follow this pattern: Windows, Unix, Java, Netscape Navigator.
I don't think Schmidt meant that these are brilliant projects, but rather that they are all bad follow-ups. The language is ambiguous.
So, either he thinks Unix is a sorry followup to MULTICS, or he's rightly upset with some of its poorer implementations...
Bad way to serve an image. Post a 1 meg jpeg, and have the browser resize it down to 600x450? A jpeg of that size could be about 50k. I hate it when people do that!
I've done about four posts in the last year, and none of them have ever been moderated up or down. Yet, my karma is -1. Still scratching my head. I hope lurkers' opinions aren't deemed unimportant, as it doesn't look like I'll be metamoderating anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, this should have been modded troll. The claim that no editors on Wikipedia check facts is nothing but inflammatory.
(I know he said "wiki" but obviously he meant Wikipedia.)
Get real. This doesn't even rate "script kiddie".
As for the answer to the question "are universities too careless with their data?" -- well, UCSB certainly was. Allowing passwords to be reset with just the SSN and birthdate was asking for trouble.
That sounds pretty odd. Nothing like the Wikipedia I know. How about linking to the edits you made, and the user talk page where you were warned to quit it? Your comment is almost like an accusation, so some evidence would appropriate.
If the government can take patents, why not farms? After all, poor people need to eat, and food makes up a significant portion of their budget. If the government owned all the farms, they could give food to poor people for free. Pretty soon, they wouldn't be poor anymore.
I really can't believe this story is being discussed calmly here. The application of "eminent domain" to patents is absolutely ridiculous. It's just state legislatures trying to expand their power and say what they think the voters would like to hear -- though it may be the most egregious example of government theft I've heard of (at this scale, in this country) in a very long time.
You are, in fact, saying that it is impossible to do better than a certain limit. By using the word "fundamentally", you have assigned a certainty to your assessment that is equivalent to a law of physics. That's not a good idea, because we are dealing in matters that are less precisely known than such things as the limiting efficiency of a thermodynamic engine.
Even worse, you appear to be aware of only two extremes: allowing anyone to contribute, or allowing only credentialed people to contribute. The discussion page I linked to above mentions several intermediate arrangements (and other, more creative solutions).
Don't mistake me: I am not saying "you are wrong, we can and will have our cake and eat it too." I am saying: you have no basis for your assumption that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. An attitude like that chokes off further development in areas where human knowledge is far from complete.
I really hate this attitude. Wikipedia is only about four years old, and you're ready to throw in the towel? The system is as good as it'll ever be?
The problem of maintaining accuracy without raising the bar to new contributors too high is being attacked from many different angles. Lots of ideas, some rather good, are being discussed. Some features have already crept into the software, and more are on the way.
Don't be like the patent office commissioner who assumed that everything that could be invented had been (well, not really... but you get my point).
Slackware users are libertarian (or even anarchist) control freaks. They react with hostility to any hint of a threat to their freedoms, and make do with a minimum of centralized control. They make friends slowly, and tend to keep them for a long, LONG time but can decisively say goodbye to any who betray them. They have very little tolerance for nonsense.
Really?
for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD
FreeBSD... seemed to "click together" better than Linux
All of your comparisons are between FreeBSD and Linux. Are you aware that the difference between distributions is large? As large as the difference between FreeBSD and Red Hat, and larger than the difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?
At 625 MB, you could fit the text of the current database on a CD. The images will jack it up another 3.6 GB. So you could reasonably fit the current revision on one DVD. If you also want the full record of changes and revisions, it's about 15 GB just for the text.
You can download this stuff easily, and it's obvious from recent Google searches that many people do.
You may not be aware of this, but the article you linked to is a copy of this one. In the interest of giving credit where it's due, you might want to give Wikipedia more exposure in the future.
Oops... he should have quoted better :) Yeah that's it.
Microserfs was fun to read, but don't forget to mention that it's a work of fiction.
Wrong. Take a look at the license sometime, it isn't too long. Here's a relevant excerpt for ya:
In a nutshell: if you distribute the software, you have to provide the source.
P. Volkerding:
Therefore, it would be necessary to keep track of 1,000,000,000,000 different md5 checksums (well, technically it's a little bit less than that, but you get the idea). I'm not sure that there are hard drives big enough to store all that data.
You wouldn't need that much space. Just calculate another md5 checksum starting at each byte position. So if the program is 1 MB, you'd need 32 MB of checksum data. That's a little more reasonable... it doesn't seem any more legal, though.
The likelihood that CT is using a browser that doesn't understand Unicode is remote. MSNBC is using a character set called Windows code page 1252, which is like the standard Latin-1 character set, except that it uses reserved positions for characters like smart quotes.
Modern browsers accept “ and ” for smart quotes, but Frontpage hasn't caught up yet...
windows character set
What you extracted was character #146, a reserved character in ISO 8859-1 (the default character set for HTML). In Microsoft's character set, #146 is the right apostrophe.
It's sad, but in some ways, Microsoft is actually LEADING technology. In this case it is the adoption of UNICODE international character set. I wish the Unix/BSD/Linux community would get their act together and get these things working.
Bzzt. Try again. This is the unicode entity for a right single quote: ’
Browsers on Linux display it just fine, but they DON'T display Microsoft's proprietary replacement. The "Unix camp" is quite up to date in this regard. The problem is, as stated before, ignorant webmasters - who don't know that Microsoft's proprietary extensions are a Bad Thing, and worse still, don't understand that the proper character to use for an apostrophe is.. an apostrophe, character #39.
Reference: The Windows Character Set
So sorry. They're expensive, protein-deficient, and have a strong emphasis on tasting good. If I want "body fuel" I'll steer clear of these.
I remember a time, it was at least a couple of months ago, when I saw a few non-inflammatory anti-GPL posts moderated down as "Troll" or such. How terrible, I thought.
That sort of thing petered out fairly quickly. Within a couple of weeks, anti-GPL posts were no longer automatically moderated down, and a few were even moderated up. Perhaps metamoderation, clunky as it is, is working.
Obcomplaint: I haven't done anything to deserve a karma of 18. Any monkey can mark 95% of the moderations "fair".
I don't think Schmidt meant that these are brilliant projects, but rather that they are all bad follow-ups. The language is ambiguous.
So, either he thinks Unix is a sorry followup to MULTICS, or he's rightly upset with some of its poorer implementations...
Bad way to serve an image. Post a 1 meg jpeg, and have the browser resize it down to 600x450? A jpeg of that size could be about 50k. I hate it when people do that!
I've done about four posts in the last year, and none of them have ever been moderated up or down. Yet, my karma is -1. Still scratching my head. I hope lurkers' opinions aren't deemed unimportant, as it doesn't look like I'll be metamoderating anytime soon.