The market actually did play out much better then anyone had thought it would. Red Hat only lost an esitmated 10,000-20,000 users when they cut the Red Hat Linux line and divided between Enterprise and Fedora. Most of those 10,000-20,000 users switched to Fedora. An upper maximum for total lost users who never went back to Red Hat is about 5,000. Alot of them have some sort of extreme attitudes in one direction or another and so they make a lot of noise on places such as slashdot, but in the real world most people didn't mind Red Hat's move, in fact a lot liked it and totally understood it. This is why Fedora Core is the fastest growing distribution and has been for quite some time (it's only a little under 2 years old, yet is the 4th largest user base and has by far the fastest growth rate of any distro. It is growing 3 times faster then Gentoo, the second fastest growing distro, and 5-7 times faster then Debian and Suse. In fact, Fedora is already over taking over Suse's entire user base (Fedora is about 37,000 users shy). Both Fedora and Suse have over 400,000 active servers according to Netcraft. Regards, Steve
Consdiering that Bank of America and a few other major investment companies are all saying to buy Red Hat stock, it probably will sky rocket again. Rumor has it that 2008 is supposed to be a good year (how someone can forecast that far ahead is beyond me). Red Hat would have still been at $29 if a major person from the corporation didn't all the sudden up and leave, investors freaked and pulled out. Anyway... you can't judge the value of a company by its stock price alone. If I had to invest in any tech comapny now, itd probably be Red Hat, I've been following them for a while and they seem to have their shit together. And now they are majorly expanding in foreign countries and governments as well. Red Hat has always been good to me and they have my full support. You really can't get quality like Red Hat's anywhere else in the market (the closest is Suse, but then no other distro even comes close and yes I've had to do professional evaluations for many distributions to find out which was best for our company which has pretty generic needs). For those who are going to complain about Red Hat's prices, Suse cost just as much if you get business level support and its support is not up to par with Red Hat from what I've seen. Also, Fedora was a great move despite all the nay-sayers. This would be why Fedora usage is already over 200,000 servers and growing over 3 times faster then any other distro (the next fastest being Gentoo, but they only have about 45,000 servers). Red Hat enterprise linux along with Fedora have 1.8 million servers, Debian is their closest competitor with 800,000 followed by Suse with 450,000 (this is all according to Netcraft). Regards, Steve
You pay people to work on your car, pay people to wire your house, pay people to build a deck, you pay qualified people to do just about everything that you aren't qualified to do. Out of the things I listed, you might be able to do some of them which is good, and go for it. Most people are not qualified to set up a computer and paying someone to come out and set it up properly followed by maybe a yearly visit would do wonders for the technology infastructure in the world. It'd also create a whole lot of jobs which is a good thing. If you have a mechanic check your car every year, why not make a qaulified computer person check out your computer every year? Regards, Steve
Then you haven't used Linux. For the past 2 years or so Linux has been superior to Windows in both GUIs, stability, and ease of use. I've got everyone from my 7 year old cousin to my girlfriend currently using Fedora. Everything "just works" and they love the features avaible to them (even just little things like being able to drag a file into a folder and have it instantly available to the web at large, or drag it into a different folder and have it password protected but still accessible to the web). If an admin isn't skilled enough to run linux, then they shouldn't be in charge of *any* system. They are not qualified regardless of their years of experience or degree/certificates. If you only know one OS and only certain applciations on that OS I don't want you anywhere near anything I'm doing because you'll only know one way of doing it and you'll be completely ignorant of possible alternatives that might work out better in the end. Only knowing one OS is like only knowing one programming language (can you even call yourself a programmer if you only know one language?), if you are one of those people you dont really have an interest in what you are doing, you were probably taught it at school and thought it'd be a good money maker. I want someone who knows and understands the options available to them so that they can assist me in making the best choice. If all they know is Microsoft, I can assure you that someone somewhere is losing money that they shouldn't be. Regards, Steve
The whole survey is skewed. Its only 3500 people and most of the distros only have the numbers they do because certain popular websites for < insert distro > had links on their front page telling people to go vote for their distro. With only 3500 votes, one website telling their visitors to go vote would have a significant impact. If you want a real survey of linux usage (although its more general, not just for the desktop) go to netcraft. In March or so they released a survey. Red Hat had 1.6 million sites running it as a server, Debian had around 800,000, Suse around 450,000. Fedora had the fastest growth rate by far and had around 200,000 servers. You can check the stats yourself here. Regards, Steve
I think you misread what I wrote, I work for a defense contractor who has contracts with the Department of Defense. The two projects I work on are for the DoD, but the DoD does not pay my salary. The DoD has most of it's research and future systems privatized with special firms. Regards, Steve
I'm more then capable of talking about what I do for a living. Saying that the projects are classified is a habit of mine so people won't take offense when I tell them that I can't tell them something. It is perfectly okay to say "I work on classified information and deal with intelligence that can't be discussed." In some cases, yes you have to completely keep quiet about what you work on, but usually they'll move you somewhere because its pretty hard to live a lie and this whole second life of yours has to be put together. Anyway, anyone working on any such projects knows exactly what they can't talk about and exaclty what they can. Oh and one more thing to keep in mind in case you ever are talking to someone with some level of clearance, it is their job to tell you when to stop and their job to control what they answer. Often times I find when I'm talking to people about what I do they'll ask something and then be like "I'm sorry I shouldnt have asked that" implying that they did something wrong, and I always politely respond "Don't worry about, you can ask whatever you want, it is my job to tell you when enough is enough". Regards, Steve
Umm just be so valuable to the company that they'll take you whether or not you sign it. I currently am employed with a pretty major defence contractor working on some classified projects for the Dod, but at the interview (they offered me the job on the spot) I told them I would absolutely not sign the NDA in the form that it was (I also do some coding for some OSS projects and I wasnt giving that up just for a job). I said I've inteviewed with 6 other companies and they all were willing to compromise, IIRC Unisys has a whole little department or system set up just for such a purpose. Anyway, they wound up just asking me to sign the non-compete agreement and never asked me to sign the NDA. They more or less told me that they just wanted me to be comfortable where I work and I'm really thankful I took this job cause it is kick-ass. Moral of the story: Stick up for yourself if you feel you're being held down, dont be scared to ask for modifications, if nothing else it shows the company that you won't take shit which looks good on your character. Regards, Steve
Heh nice comment. But in all seriousness, passwords should only be sent over https so the proxy never knows what it really is, just the encrypted form, and session ids that expire after 30 minutes or so of no activity along with a unique session ID that is apart of all urls during your session or something along those lines would help immensely. Someone would have to a) be using the same cache as you, b) guess your session ID out of oh lets say at least 2^128 possibilites at a minimum and c) Do all of this before your session time runs up (or if all they want to do is view your data they can skip this step). Good security is hard and might be taxing on the server, but worth it:) Regards, Steve
If your security can be bypassed through a simple cache then your security is nonexistant. There are many ways to implement security regardless of caches and any major site does so. Even if you close your caching proxy to only your lan, do you still want employess having access to areas the boss has access to? Or how about the many dial-up providers who cache content to increase speeds? This is not a problem with google, this is a problem with web security. This is why qualified people should be hired to write any kind of secure web app, too many kiddies grab some php scripts set up a mysql server and think everything is great. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way, this is a result of a lack of education and I can only hope that this popular web proxy of google's brings it to everyone's attention. Hell even some web servers will dynamically cache often visited pages and just serve them up from the cache, people need to become more security minded. Regards, Steve
OpenOffice.Org's codebase is over 16 years old. It is quite mature, and for a while it implemented its own toolkit simply because the many platforms it ran on didn't have any standard toolkits. It became a dying piece of software until Sun revived it in 1999 and gave it to the community (similar to how Netscape kept the browser alive by giving it to the community). Everyone thinks that OO.o copied alot of its look and feel from MS (and recently they have been trying to do that more and more, not that that is necessarily bad), but go back 5 or 10 years and you'll see that OO.o had many features before MS and MS (surprisingly) copied all of its biggest features from already existing office suites. MS became the market leader by copying off the likes of OO.o, hopefully OO.o can take the lead and finish the job by getting a few ideas back from MS (although in all honesty, the only big thing implemented in MS Office in the past couple of years has been digital signing and other permission based things, which imho OpenOffice.org implements way better and easier already. Also I think MS requires you to be running Server 2003 or something to use the key store which sucks). Regards, Steve
You can export it to Flash. In the older version it lost all effects, in the newer beta though it might implement them, I'm not sure but its worth giving it a look. Regards, Steve
You my friend need to grab a book on linux. Them services aren't cryptic, and if you go to System Settings->Server Settings->Services you can check which ones you want to run, you can restart them if need be and you get a nice little description for each service (or do it all through the appropriate scripts if you dont like a gui). Nothing hard about it. But regardless, 3 minutes to boot? What are you running on? The latest updates with the 2.6.11 kernel release from the Fedora crew boots up in around 30 seconds wall clock time on a variety of machines I run. Do you not upgrade your kernel? It was a known issue that FC3's stock kernel took long to boot, and it's since been fixed and updated for months just fyi. Regards, Steve
Err Red Hat has always provided full source to everything and has never tried to hide the fact that it uses GPL code. In fact it thrives on it, Red Hat produces more open code then any other entity. This includes gnome.org, the kernel, apache, gcj, and most other major open source projects are maintained mostly on Red Hat's payroll. Linus never seemed to have an issue with anything they did, he did afterall take something 10 million dollars worth of stock that they gave him for free just for his contributions. Some major open source folks work at Red Hat, everything from top kernel maintainers, to the guy who wrote the first gcc c++ compiler. People very rarely appreciate what Red Hat has done for the community. Regards, Steve
Where you live is very important. In the east coast major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington D.C. (all of which I frequent) Very few people in any religion disagree with evolution anymore. Its just accepted as fact because it is fact (I'm a christian btw). All of us experience evolution everyday not just in the foods we eat, but more importantly in ourselves. Your parents combined 50% of each of their DNA in some "random" configuration with a few possible mutations. If it turns out that these combinations and mutations were beneficial or neutral (which something like 90% are), then you have a very high probability of living long and reproducing new offspring with a high probability of them having genes neutral with yours or even more improved. If you get a bad combination or mutation, you'll most likely suffer some mental or phsyical disability that in many cases will stop you from spreading those bad genes any further. It sounds harsh, but that is evolution. The strong get stronger and the weak die off and this happens thousands of times a day in hospitals across the globe. You wanna see evolution? Go visit a hospital and watch some babies get born and some unfortunate severly handicapped person spend their life in a hospital bed. (Someone here is going to argue that I'm describing microevolution, to which I respond that evolution is a long and pain staking process, it must be taken in baby steps as it is. A bunch of small mutations and improvements, or as you call microevolution, over a long period of time will indeed result in huge changes such as the variety of species found on earth just like adding very small numbers a large number of times will result in a large number). Regards, Steve
Whether or not we had a reason to go to war, I'm glad we did. If I see my neighbor continuously beating his wife and his wife is incapable of getting away from him and I've tried other measures, I'm gonna go over and kick his ass and make sure he never goes near her again. Saddam Hussein was bad for the world, he is out of power now, I consider that a success. Nothing else matters, related to or not to 9/11. I would like to see our troops get pulled out asap (I did vote for Kerry), but invading was a good thing for the world. People always try to show Iraq as a failure, but I work on government projects for the DoD and often deal directly with Iraq and people (soldiers and civilians) affected by this war. In most parts of Iraq, life is way better despite what the media will tell you. People claim that the US media is biased (and it is) to not make it look so bad, well I can tell you that the foreign media is just as hell bent on making it look like its a total mess and a failure. In other words both sides have their agendas, so unless you've been in iraq and/or talked to folks directly from there during this period, keep your mouth shut about it, you don't have a clue. Unfortunately alot of people have died for this, but such is the nature of life. Regards, Steve
As soon as support is released I'll be putting on my site a pure html/javascript/svg whiteboard that anyone can draw to and gets updated in realtime through XMLHttpRequest (well actually JSON-RPC in this case, but same idea). I've been waiting a while for this and didn't want to burden users with plugins. Adding SVG will be the most significant advancement of the web in quite some time. Regards, Steve
Light travels 3*10^8 m/s in a vaccum. Light has a thing called index of refraction, in a vacuum n=1, in water it is 1.333 and in diamond n = 2.419 (diamond is known to have one of the highest indexes, actually the highest index of common materials). Because n is so high, the velocity of light through diamond is literally 2.419 times slower then in a vacuum (the actual velocity in this case doesn't matter, but you can probably figure it out in your head). Now you're thinking, well damn that is really fast still and you are right, it is still extremely fast. Then comes into play another factor, which when dealing with electricity and current is referred to as drift velocity, not sure if there is a special term when dealing with the physics of light so I'll call it drift velocity as well and maybe someone else can correct me if I'm mistaken. When light is passing through each of these diamonds it is being refracted, as in it is not going perfectly foward, in fact it'll even go a little backwards sometimes. As a result you get a lot of back and forth bouncing around, covering tracks already covered, moving at a high velocity, but since you're going back and forth and not straight, you cover very little distance. As a result of this, they take the average velocity which is in this case referred to as the drift velocity. Drift has such a dramatic impact that it truly does take the velocity of light all the way down to something a car could outpace. They can increase the drift velocity by being careful about the shape and orientation of the diamonds, but the effect will always be there in some form or another as far as I know (maybe there are special cases that I just can't recall right now).
The physics of all this are of course much more involved and/. doesnt have an equation editor so no equations were mentioned (not that they were needed to get the point across). If something about this doesnt make sense just reply with a question, I'm sure me or some other/.er can answer you (regardless of the quality of/. recently, I still have hope that it can become a haven again for geeks and geek talk and a community that helps each other out rather then criticizing each other ) Regards, Steve
Ouch, in the Philadelphia area I hang out with folks from Drexel, Temple, University Of Pennsylvania, PennState, LaSalle, and a few other smaller colleges and out of 50 or 60 people that I'm thinking of just off the top of my head I know about 3 or 4 who are pot heads. I guess percentage wise it's still pretty signifacnt but in highschool damn near everyone did it, I'd guess around 80%. It's true that all of those 50-60 people (except 5 or so) have all at one point smoked pot but hardly anyone does anymore. Maybe its just a dying trend in this area, I actually started having some hope for humanity again though;) Regards, Steve
When referring to the brain I more or less meant the higher functions of the brain such as thought and motor skills, which to my knowledge is not significantly affected by nicotine, but is severly affected by weed. Also, the effects of weed do *not* completely disappear over time. Like I said, because of nerve plasticity everytime you smoke weed you are making your self more stupid and you're making it permanent to some degree. It's akin in some ways to listening to loud music all of the time. Immediately after removing the headphones for a while, your hearing will get back to expected levels. Over some years of continuously listening to loud music you will lose your hearing or have it significantly impacted (Hearing loss is almost always caused by desensitizing nerves and having the nerves "save" their state through plasticity or some other means, very similar to the brain and weed). Regards, Steve
Perhaps you should read up on nerves and plasticity. Where as tobacco technically doesnt mess with your brain, it just causes a whole bunch of physical ailments, weed is kind of the opposite. Weed will slow down mental thoughts, make them blurry (or completely gone), make facts distorted (everything from elementary facts like 2+2 = 4 all the way to your very own name and the laws of physics), and causes many other mental problems. Weed won't kill you, it'll just make you stupid as hell and because of the nature of nerve cells, unless there are some major advances in science, you can't reverse the effects of weed. Now some people enjoy being stupid, so more power to them, but me personally, I'm all about trying to advance humanity. Anyway, smoking weed is one of those dumb things that high school kids do, its barely even smoked at the college level anymore, I can't even remember the last time I saw it. Regards, Steve
They do this on a regular basis to different net blocks. It happens all the time at random intervals. They do need stats of course, but they don't need stats from every single click. As a result, they take a random sampling of a large enough space that the results are accurate for the whole "population". Its all about statistics. Regardless, if you follow search engines *at all* you know about this, its better then the other search engines do and it also helps keep down unnecessary loads on their servers. Why get information that needs to be processed when it doesnt change the final result of something and you can get that result with less effort? Regards, Steve
I have recommended to all users of AOL to simply hit the spam button if they get *anything* they dont want. Its just not worth risking a fake mailing list thing claiming its legit, you click an "unsubscribe link" and you'll be receiving at least 2000 spam a day within 24 hours. I've seen it happen too many times. My advice is that mailing lists obviously aren't as certain and trustworthy as they used to be, try chaning to something else, i.e. posting things in a forum style on a website. If user's are interested, then they'll visit the site every day, if they become uninterested they just stop going. It isnt any more work for the user, they are either going to open a "favorite" or going to open their mail. Regardless, many people just recommend that if you dont want something, don't fuss with it, just click "spam". It's simple from a user interface perspective, and then its lieft for someone else to figure out. In the end, everything is about user experience, isn't it? Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
The market actually did play out much better then anyone had thought it would. Red Hat only lost an esitmated 10,000-20,000 users when they cut the Red Hat Linux line and divided between Enterprise and Fedora. Most of those 10,000-20,000 users switched to Fedora. An upper maximum for total lost users who never went back to Red Hat is about 5,000. Alot of them have some sort of extreme attitudes in one direction or another and so they make a lot of noise on places such as slashdot, but in the real world most people didn't mind Red Hat's move, in fact a lot liked it and totally understood it. This is why Fedora Core is the fastest growing distribution and has been for quite some time (it's only a little under 2 years old, yet is the 4th largest user base and has by far the fastest growth rate of any distro. It is growing 3 times faster then Gentoo, the second fastest growing distro, and 5-7 times faster then Debian and Suse. In fact, Fedora is already over taking over Suse's entire user base (Fedora is about 37,000 users shy). Both Fedora and Suse have over 400,000 active servers according to Netcraft.
Regards,
Steve
Consdiering that Bank of America and a few other major investment companies are all saying to buy Red Hat stock, it probably will sky rocket again. Rumor has it that 2008 is supposed to be a good year (how someone can forecast that far ahead is beyond me). Red Hat would have still been at $29 if a major person from the corporation didn't all the sudden up and leave, investors freaked and pulled out. Anyway... you can't judge the value of a company by its stock price alone. If I had to invest in any tech comapny now, itd probably be Red Hat, I've been following them for a while and they seem to have their shit together. And now they are majorly expanding in foreign countries and governments as well. Red Hat has always been good to me and they have my full support. You really can't get quality like Red Hat's anywhere else in the market (the closest is Suse, but then no other distro even comes close and yes I've had to do professional evaluations for many distributions to find out which was best for our company which has pretty generic needs). For those who are going to complain about Red Hat's prices, Suse cost just as much if you get business level support and its support is not up to par with Red Hat from what I've seen. Also, Fedora was a great move despite all the nay-sayers. This would be why Fedora usage is already over 200,000 servers and growing over 3 times faster then any other distro (the next fastest being Gentoo, but they only have about 45,000 servers). Red Hat enterprise linux along with Fedora have 1.8 million servers, Debian is their closest competitor with 800,000 followed by Suse with 450,000 (this is all according to Netcraft).
Regards,
Steve
You pay people to work on your car, pay people to wire your house, pay people to build a deck, you pay qualified people to do just about everything that you aren't qualified to do. Out of the things I listed, you might be able to do some of them which is good, and go for it. Most people are not qualified to set up a computer and paying someone to come out and set it up properly followed by maybe a yearly visit would do wonders for the technology infastructure in the world. It'd also create a whole lot of jobs which is a good thing. If you have a mechanic check your car every year, why not make a qaulified computer person check out your computer every year?
Regards,
Steve
Then you haven't used Linux. For the past 2 years or so Linux has been superior to Windows in both GUIs, stability, and ease of use. I've got everyone from my 7 year old cousin to my girlfriend currently using Fedora. Everything "just works" and they love the features avaible to them (even just little things like being able to drag a file into a folder and have it instantly available to the web at large, or drag it into a different folder and have it password protected but still accessible to the web). If an admin isn't skilled enough to run linux, then they shouldn't be in charge of *any* system. They are not qualified regardless of their years of experience or degree/certificates. If you only know one OS and only certain applciations on that OS I don't want you anywhere near anything I'm doing because you'll only know one way of doing it and you'll be completely ignorant of possible alternatives that might work out better in the end. Only knowing one OS is like only knowing one programming language (can you even call yourself a programmer if you only know one language?), if you are one of those people you dont really have an interest in what you are doing, you were probably taught it at school and thought it'd be a good money maker. I want someone who knows and understands the options available to them so that they can assist me in making the best choice. If all they know is Microsoft, I can assure you that someone somewhere is losing money that they shouldn't be.
Regards,
Steve
The whole survey is skewed. Its only 3500 people and most of the distros only have the numbers they do because certain popular websites for < insert distro > had links on their front page telling people to go vote for their distro. With only 3500 votes, one website telling their visitors to go vote would have a significant impact. If you want a real survey of linux usage (although its more general, not just for the desktop) go to netcraft. In March or so they released a survey. Red Hat had 1.6 million sites running it as a server, Debian had around 800,000, Suse around 450,000. Fedora had the fastest growth rate by far and had around 200,000 servers. You can check the stats yourself here.
Regards,
Steve
I think you misread what I wrote, I work for a defense contractor who has contracts with the Department of Defense. The two projects I work on are for the DoD, but the DoD does not pay my salary. The DoD has most of it's research and future systems privatized with special firms.
Regards,
Steve
Perhaps he was encrypting his backups because of the nature of the research.
Regards,
Steve
I'm more then capable of talking about what I do for a living. Saying that the projects are classified is a habit of mine so people won't take offense when I tell them that I can't tell them something. It is perfectly okay to say "I work on classified information and deal with intelligence that can't be discussed." In some cases, yes you have to completely keep quiet about what you work on, but usually they'll move you somewhere because its pretty hard to live a lie and this whole second life of yours has to be put together. Anyway, anyone working on any such projects knows exactly what they can't talk about and exaclty what they can. Oh and one more thing to keep in mind in case you ever are talking to someone with some level of clearance, it is their job to tell you when to stop and their job to control what they answer. Often times I find when I'm talking to people about what I do they'll ask something and then be like "I'm sorry I shouldnt have asked that" implying that they did something wrong, and I always politely respond "Don't worry about, you can ask whatever you want, it is my job to tell you when enough is enough".
Regards,
Steve
Umm just be so valuable to the company that they'll take you whether or not you sign it. I currently am employed with a pretty major defence contractor working on some classified projects for the Dod, but at the interview (they offered me the job on the spot) I told them I would absolutely not sign the NDA in the form that it was (I also do some coding for some OSS projects and I wasnt giving that up just for a job). I said I've inteviewed with 6 other companies and they all were willing to compromise, IIRC Unisys has a whole little department or system set up just for such a purpose. Anyway, they wound up just asking me to sign the non-compete agreement and never asked me to sign the NDA. They more or less told me that they just wanted me to be comfortable where I work and I'm really thankful I took this job cause it is kick-ass. Moral of the story: Stick up for yourself if you feel you're being held down, dont be scared to ask for modifications, if nothing else it shows the company that you won't take shit which looks good on your character.
Regards,
Steve
Heh nice comment. But in all seriousness, passwords should only be sent over https so the proxy never knows what it really is, just the encrypted form, and session ids that expire after 30 minutes or so of no activity along with a unique session ID that is apart of all urls during your session or something along those lines would help immensely. Someone would have to a) be using the same cache as you, b) guess your session ID out of oh lets say at least 2^128 possibilites at a minimum and c) Do all of this before your session time runs up (or if all they want to do is view your data they can skip this step). Good security is hard and might be taxing on the server, but worth it :)
Regards,
Steve
If your security can be bypassed through a simple cache then your security is nonexistant. There are many ways to implement security regardless of caches and any major site does so. Even if you close your caching proxy to only your lan, do you still want employess having access to areas the boss has access to? Or how about the many dial-up providers who cache content to increase speeds? This is not a problem with google, this is a problem with web security. This is why qualified people should be hired to write any kind of secure web app, too many kiddies grab some php scripts set up a mysql server and think everything is great. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way, this is a result of a lack of education and I can only hope that this popular web proxy of google's brings it to everyone's attention. Hell even some web servers will dynamically cache often visited pages and just serve them up from the cache, people need to become more security minded.
Regards,
Steve
OpenOffice.Org's codebase is over 16 years old. It is quite mature, and for a while it implemented its own toolkit simply because the many platforms it ran on didn't have any standard toolkits. It became a dying piece of software until Sun revived it in 1999 and gave it to the community (similar to how Netscape kept the browser alive by giving it to the community). Everyone thinks that OO.o copied alot of its look and feel from MS (and recently they have been trying to do that more and more, not that that is necessarily bad), but go back 5 or 10 years and you'll see that OO.o had many features before MS and MS (surprisingly) copied all of its biggest features from already existing office suites. MS became the market leader by copying off the likes of OO.o, hopefully OO.o can take the lead and finish the job by getting a few ideas back from MS (although in all honesty, the only big thing implemented in MS Office in the past couple of years has been digital signing and other permission based things, which imho OpenOffice.org implements way better and easier already. Also I think MS requires you to be running Server 2003 or something to use the key store which sucks).
Regards,
Steve
You can export it to Flash. In the older version it lost all effects, in the newer beta though it might implement them, I'm not sure but its worth giving it a look.
Regards,
Steve
Ahh fair enough :) My apologies for missing your point.
Regards,
Steve
You my friend need to grab a book on linux. Them services aren't cryptic, and if you go to System Settings->Server Settings->Services you can check which ones you want to run, you can restart them if need be and you get a nice little description for each service (or do it all through the appropriate scripts if you dont like a gui). Nothing hard about it. But regardless, 3 minutes to boot? What are you running on? The latest updates with the 2.6.11 kernel release from the Fedora crew boots up in around 30 seconds wall clock time on a variety of machines I run. Do you not upgrade your kernel? It was a known issue that FC3's stock kernel took long to boot, and it's since been fixed and updated for months just fyi.
Regards,
Steve
Err Red Hat has always provided full source to everything and has never tried to hide the fact that it uses GPL code. In fact it thrives on it, Red Hat produces more open code then any other entity. This includes gnome.org, the kernel, apache, gcj, and most other major open source projects are maintained mostly on Red Hat's payroll. Linus never seemed to have an issue with anything they did, he did afterall take something 10 million dollars worth of stock that they gave him for free just for his contributions. Some major open source folks work at Red Hat, everything from top kernel maintainers, to the guy who wrote the first gcc c++ compiler. People very rarely appreciate what Red Hat has done for the community.
Regards,
Steve
Where you live is very important. In the east coast major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington D.C. (all of which I frequent) Very few people in any religion disagree with evolution anymore. Its just accepted as fact because it is fact (I'm a christian btw). All of us experience evolution everyday not just in the foods we eat, but more importantly in ourselves. Your parents combined 50% of each of their DNA in some "random" configuration with a few possible mutations. If it turns out that these combinations and mutations were beneficial or neutral (which something like 90% are), then you have a very high probability of living long and reproducing new offspring with a high probability of them having genes neutral with yours or even more improved. If you get a bad combination or mutation, you'll most likely suffer some mental or phsyical disability that in many cases will stop you from spreading those bad genes any further. It sounds harsh, but that is evolution. The strong get stronger and the weak die off and this happens thousands of times a day in hospitals across the globe. You wanna see evolution? Go visit a hospital and watch some babies get born and some unfortunate severly handicapped person spend their life in a hospital bed. (Someone here is going to argue that I'm describing microevolution, to which I respond that evolution is a long and pain staking process, it must be taken in baby steps as it is. A bunch of small mutations and improvements, or as you call microevolution, over a long period of time will indeed result in huge changes such as the variety of species found on earth just like adding very small numbers a large number of times will result in a large number).
Regards,
Steve
Whether or not we had a reason to go to war, I'm glad we did. If I see my neighbor continuously beating his wife and his wife is incapable of getting away from him and I've tried other measures, I'm gonna go over and kick his ass and make sure he never goes near her again. Saddam Hussein was bad for the world, he is out of power now, I consider that a success. Nothing else matters, related to or not to 9/11. I would like to see our troops get pulled out asap (I did vote for Kerry), but invading was a good thing for the world. People always try to show Iraq as a failure, but I work on government projects for the DoD and often deal directly with Iraq and people (soldiers and civilians) affected by this war. In most parts of Iraq, life is way better despite what the media will tell you. People claim that the US media is biased (and it is) to not make it look so bad, well I can tell you that the foreign media is just as hell bent on making it look like its a total mess and a failure. In other words both sides have their agendas, so unless you've been in iraq and/or talked to folks directly from there during this period, keep your mouth shut about it, you don't have a clue. Unfortunately alot of people have died for this, but such is the nature of life.
Regards,
Steve
As soon as support is released I'll be putting on my site a pure html/javascript/svg whiteboard that anyone can draw to and gets updated in realtime through XMLHttpRequest (well actually JSON-RPC in this case, but same idea). I've been waiting a while for this and didn't want to burden users with plugins. Adding SVG will be the most significant advancement of the web in quite some time.
Regards,
Steve
Light travels 3*10^8 m/s in a vaccum. Light has a thing called index of refraction, in a vacuum n=1, in water it is 1.333 and in diamond n = 2.419 (diamond is known to have one of the highest indexes, actually the highest index of common materials). Because n is so high, the velocity of light through diamond is literally 2.419 times slower then in a vacuum (the actual velocity in this case doesn't matter, but you can probably figure it out in your head). Now you're thinking, well damn that is really fast still and you are right, it is still extremely fast. Then comes into play another factor, which when dealing with electricity and current is referred to as drift velocity, not sure if there is a special term when dealing with the physics of light so I'll call it drift velocity as well and maybe someone else can correct me if I'm mistaken. When light is passing through each of these diamonds it is being refracted, as in it is not going perfectly foward, in fact it'll even go a little backwards sometimes. As a result you get a lot of back and forth bouncing around, covering tracks already covered, moving at a high velocity, but since you're going back and forth and not straight, you cover very little distance. As a result of this, they take the average velocity which is in this case referred to as the drift velocity. Drift has such a dramatic impact that it truly does take the velocity of light all the way down to something a car could outpace. They can increase the drift velocity by being careful about the shape and orientation of the diamonds, but the effect will always be there in some form or another as far as I know (maybe there are special cases that I just can't recall right now).
/. doesnt have an equation editor so no equations were mentioned (not that they were needed to get the point across). If something about this doesnt make sense just reply with a question, I'm sure me or some other /.er can answer you (regardless of the quality of /. recently, I still have hope that it can become a haven again for geeks and geek talk and a community that helps each other out rather then criticizing each other )
The physics of all this are of course much more involved and
Regards,
Steve
Ouch, in the Philadelphia area I hang out with folks from Drexel, Temple, University Of Pennsylvania, PennState, LaSalle, and a few other smaller colleges and out of 50 or 60 people that I'm thinking of just off the top of my head I know about 3 or 4 who are pot heads. I guess percentage wise it's still pretty signifacnt but in highschool damn near everyone did it, I'd guess around 80%. It's true that all of those 50-60 people (except 5 or so) have all at one point smoked pot but hardly anyone does anymore. Maybe its just a dying trend in this area, I actually started having some hope for humanity again though ;)
Regards,
Steve
When referring to the brain I more or less meant the higher functions of the brain such as thought and motor skills, which to my knowledge is not significantly affected by nicotine, but is severly affected by weed. Also, the effects of weed do *not* completely disappear over time. Like I said, because of nerve plasticity everytime you smoke weed you are making your self more stupid and you're making it permanent to some degree. It's akin in some ways to listening to loud music all of the time. Immediately after removing the headphones for a while, your hearing will get back to expected levels. Over some years of continuously listening to loud music you will lose your hearing or have it significantly impacted (Hearing loss is almost always caused by desensitizing nerves and having the nerves "save" their state through plasticity or some other means, very similar to the brain and weed).
Regards,
Steve
Perhaps you should read up on nerves and plasticity. Where as tobacco technically doesnt mess with your brain, it just causes a whole bunch of physical ailments, weed is kind of the opposite. Weed will slow down mental thoughts, make them blurry (or completely gone), make facts distorted (everything from elementary facts like 2+2 = 4 all the way to your very own name and the laws of physics), and causes many other mental problems. Weed won't kill you, it'll just make you stupid as hell and because of the nature of nerve cells, unless there are some major advances in science, you can't reverse the effects of weed. Now some people enjoy being stupid, so more power to them, but me personally, I'm all about trying to advance humanity. Anyway, smoking weed is one of those dumb things that high school kids do, its barely even smoked at the college level anymore, I can't even remember the last time I saw it.
Regards,
Steve
They do this on a regular basis to different net blocks. It happens all the time at random intervals. They do need stats of course, but they don't need stats from every single click. As a result, they take a random sampling of a large enough space that the results are accurate for the whole "population". Its all about statistics. Regardless, if you follow search engines *at all* you know about this, its better then the other search engines do and it also helps keep down unnecessary loads on their servers. Why get information that needs to be processed when it doesnt change the final result of something and you can get that result with less effort?
Regards,
Steve
I have recommended to all users of AOL to simply hit the spam button if they get *anything* they dont want. Its just not worth risking a fake mailing list thing claiming its legit, you click an "unsubscribe link" and you'll be receiving at least 2000 spam a day within 24 hours. I've seen it happen too many times. My advice is that mailing lists obviously aren't as certain and trustworthy as they used to be, try chaning to something else, i.e. posting things in a forum style on a website. If user's are interested, then they'll visit the site every day, if they become uninterested they just stop going. It isnt any more work for the user, they are either going to open a "favorite" or going to open their mail. Regardless, many people just recommend that if you dont want something, don't fuss with it, just click "spam". It's simple from a user interface perspective, and then its lieft for someone else to figure out. In the end, everything is about user experience, isn't it?
Regards,
Steve