That's stupid. He might turn money down. Now it's announced that proof is correct and that makes him candidate for that prize.
Even Russian newspapers do not have any official reaction of Perelman himself yet.
His (western) colleagues speculate that he might turn the award down. He is too far from normal life and money would distract him - so his friends say. That's speculation.
Nothing extraordinary really. In USSR, mathematics (as well physics) was just one of the top prioritized subjects. As one of my german friends compared me and his son, we soviet pupils have had about twice more mathematics during our school times.
Mathematics is not about numbers and problems - it teaches brain to think. Nothing more.
As if it was surprising. Advocating open standards is by no mean safe business...:-(
Not that I was fired for such, but you really had to see that at least once - all "the disadvantages" of using open standards as they are depicted by sales and marketdroids: competitors can "steal" your business!!!
Open source solves half of proprietary software problem. And Perens was one of the first who started working in direction of advertising open standards.
Many products try to establish and distance themselves by implementing "unique" (read: "non-interoperable") features. FLOSS is no exception from the rule. Ego is what starts and drives development and ego is what hinders and kills the development.
That's silly. Kid, you have to grow up one day and check that "real world" thing surrounding you.
Games and pornography serve the very same purpose: give our brain a break. There are really few option what usual work'a'droids like we all can do to break out of that damned circle of urban life: wake up, commute, breakfast, work, lunch, work, commute, diner, TV, sleep, wake up, etc. And if one has family, that basically means that one even has no week-ends to break out of that routine.
And there is nothing more to why games and pornography exist in particular and entertainment industry in general.
(N.B. Kids love to play in general since kids like to receive new experiences. And games are easiest way to get to wide range of experiences directly to our brain, no "real world" would ever deliver. No surprises here.)
P.S. On topic. No high-brow games? Guys, are you reading solely PRs from Electornic Arts, Microsoft & Sony??? There are lots of little (and little known about) freeware games around. Check out KDE games for one good example. Check what people do with PyGame package for example. Games now are very very very big business with very tight competition. There are no place left for entrepreneurs. That's why I'm directing you to independent community-developed games, most of them are freeware or even open source. No PRs though - games only. My last favorite one is VegaStrike: quite nice but taking time to learn space simulator (or Elite clone, whatever).
And hardly anybody uses XHTML because it provides no advantage over HTML.
I advise you to check what you browser renders. Most of the CMS check what visiting browser is and generate XHTML if supported. (E.g. mozilla.org is mostly XHTML, http://browsehappy.com/, etc)
XHTML is XML-compliant and can be rendered by browsers faster. That is main advantage of XHTML. For real life HTML, it's next to impossible to verify validity. XHTML solves that problem allowing browsers to skip many checks and thus render pages considerably faster.
Wrong, since your advise has link to browser favored by you. In other words, it's not anymore about "browser supporting standard" but "standard browser we do support".
Link to http://browsehappy.com/browsers/ IMHO would be better. The site was established long ago and lists proper alternatives to IE for all platforms. It's bit too much into security and wasn't updated recently, yet it is a great starting point.
+10. Seems like time have come to implement subset of X/HTML w/o any bells and whistles - object/scrip included. As wide as X/HTML is used now that could become serious problem sooner than later. (E.g. many Mozilla problems fall into that category: JavaScript is run were it wasn't expected to be run.)
Just like ActiveX now widely used by by spy/mal/ware: all what the little worms need to do is to tell IE to render some particular web page, in few easy steps ActiveX is launched and your PC is - voila! - already infected.
JavaScript isn't powerful enough to create as much problems as ActiveX is capable of, but I do think that it is UNwise to allow plain message with pictures/links - what most of programmers want of HTML renderer - to do anything more than render plain message with pictures/links.
So that's the reason to keep €18-25 price mark on 20-25 years old recordings??? (I'm refereing to "Queen" - not a "Beatles" fan.) That's looks insane to me.
+10.
I'm ranting about that for more that 3 years - when BD/HD DVD groups both announced that they are going to use 5" diameter disk as it is used now for CD/DVD media.
I'm not buying BD/HD-DVD on 5" anytime soon. I have already half of my flat covered by CD/DVD boxes. I do not want them anymore. They are way too big - they take too much space of my living room. They are too big - they do not fit my pockets.
I'm not interested in 5" BD @ 50GB - but 3" BD @ 15-20GB would be very interesting. The BD/HD-DVD consortiums seems to be more interested in benchmarks - who has longest - not what really consumers want.
P.S. SD card sized media is like dream at moment. No way you would reach current price milestone set by DVD: $0.25 per gigabyte. Not even close to $1/GB. Flash SD cards are now about $50/GB...:-(
All SACD sold here in Europe have CD compatibility layer. I have bunch if SACDs I have bought thinking that I was buying CDs. And they play in my CD player just fine.
It was the bet of SACD. Not to rush transition, but to saturate market with dual layer disks (SACD + CD) what would help in long term to sell SACD players too.
In other words, SACD must have taught us that it must be CD compatible to sell. SACD sells well, since most people buy them as normal CDs - not specifically as SACDs.
Anyway, with advent of iTMS/subscription services, business-wise spending money of new disk format seems to be total waste to me. What does Warner really think? Does not it have already enough money loosing business to take care of?
Provided that would be found any serious problems and Jobs would be found to be related to the problems.
For financial stuff public companies have CFOs - chief financial officer. It's not responsibility of CEO to overview SEC reports - it's responsibility of CFO.
In other words, I beleive Peter Oppenheimer (?, if Google's not lying) as current Apple CFO has more to lose.
Too late! The one of the reasons of rise of nVidia and fall of SGI was strategy of SGI to move from graphics to server space. SGI basically sold all of its IP to nVidia at the time they have had a 3D graphics patent dispute. Many people fired along with departure from graphics had been picked up by nVidia. (One guy commented with that info in response to The Register article covering SGI bankruptcy filing.)
I kept an eye on OpenGL/OpenAL/OpenML/Khronos/etc announcements last 5(6?) years. The news gradually were changing: before they were signed mostly by somebuddy@sgi.com - now pal@nvidia.com all over the place. So the story didn't surprised me at all.
Seems Linspire is moving to the business model of giving away the software and charging
for the support.
From all what I can tell, most Windows users have fear of tech support. In all my years of helping people with Linux, I found it to be very very easily supportable. Hardest part is to convince user that there is nothing in Linux monstrous like e.g. Windows' registry, that even if user screwed something up - all the damage can be easily recovered.
Still even after that, most people are very reluctant to call non-free support. They just say that "computer broke". Though most of the time they wouldn't hesitate to bring the PC to my place - just like TV - for "repair".
I think that Freespire/Linspire/whatever has hard road ahead to overcome. Good luck. We definitely need more people like Michael Robertson. Not a personal fan, but I always admired people trying to achieve more.
18Mln vs. 190k euros? I'd say it doesn't hurt to try.
From my personal experience, 5 years ago Linux had problem of application availability and the quality of the applications. Now, most problems boil down to "Wind0ze does it differently". IOW, If you deploy Linux-only environment such problems don't exist.
I once worked for three years in Linux-only house. After 4 years on WinNT4. That was best experience of my life: easy installation and recovery, painless networking, simple backup, no-brainer collaboration with others, etc. Perl, python, apache/php/mysql, cvs, gcc, gdb, vim, etc - all stuff already installed for your there. And it all works! All servers are only click away. But of course the experience depends on kind of work you are doing. I'm software developer and Linux known to be developers' "nirvana".
It's possible to make that process secure. And in fact something similar is already done by SELinux: any un-authorized modifications of files would render the files unaccessible. It's simple mater of giving every user unique key.
In other words, using RSA terminlogy, any vote has to be signed with: key of voter, key of software and key of hardware. That would make quite close match to ballot trail. Later on, votes can be verified by checking the signatures. Is there any voter with such key? Was the key of software in set of allowed software versions? Was the vote cast on certifier hardware with proper key and serial number?
That would be magnitude harder to crack: you would have to find key of a particular voter and key of particular voting machine. Software versions since they are few are easier to guess.
And such measures are not all that complicated to implement. For example voter keys can be generated randomly right before casting vote. The key needs to be stored separately (only for verification purposes). Key is generated, backed up and stored to (e.g. smart) card. Then (with the card) person casts (and signs) his vote. The vote is also signed by key of software. Then serial number of casting machine added and all that again signed by machine's key. The personal key is then erased from the card and if needed it can be printed and given to the voter. All that can be done automatically.
In Russia (with current level of corruption) people are afraid more of police itself rather than of criminals (police is supposed to protect people from). Again. Several polls have shown that 40% of people see real threat coming from police and only about 25% threat of being offended by criminals.
That's the real life effect of corruption: from standpoint of people with power there is no difference between normal people and criminals.
As I see it from over the pond, US is moving in the same direction.
Then I guess she shouldn't have entered into a contract that was a bad business deal for her.
Then probably I guess you never tried to record, publish and promote your own album. You can pick lots of funny information by yourself.
There is no other word for that business but "mafia". They are middle man, standing between creators and fans. They rob artists of what they create - under guise of helping them with all the bureaucracy and formalities (All the bureaucracy and formalities help nobody else but recording companies - and quite questionable why it is there in first place). Then they force DRMs on consumers and restrictive contracts on broadcasters makeing sure that you get the work of artist only from them and only on condition they have set.
FYI.
Have you ever wondered by some crap like "Britney Spears"/etc make so high in hit lists? I asked that question to DJ of one german FM radio I met in pub. (Well, Okay, I asked why they have for every hour of good new music they 12 hours of old trash. Do you start guessing how the questions relate?) Right, RIAA (or its german face Sony BMG) sets in (very long) contract conditions on programming of FM stations with restriction like: "two new promoted songs cannot be aired in the same hour", "new promoted song has to be separated at least by 5(?) minutes from any other song", "you can't air more than 4 news songs per hour", "you can't air new or promoted song next to another promoted or new song respectively." I can't tell the restrictions precisely. But I hope you get the spirit of the conditions boradcaster have to deal with.
The goal of such silly conditions to make sure that some stupid talentless voiceless signer(in) would catch your attention. No way you would get away from that promoted song: first they assault your brain with 100 times repeated hit of 80s and then BA-BAM! new song. No way human brain (exhausted by the commercials and old crap before) would manage to reject the new song. The content of the song is irrelevant - it just has to be new/different.
Conditions in the contract make sure that song would stand out on the dull background. And here you have it: some talentless voiceless macho gets on top of hit lists, while probaly having only sex appeal.
Often, they just approach young performer with offer "Do you wanna us to make you the star???" Who of beginners in his/her right ming would turn down such offer.
Are artists under any obligation to sign contracts with them? Absolutely not.
Step by step.
1. Renting recording studio is very expensive. Very.
2. Hiring professional sound editor is very very expensive. You can edit by yourself - but quality would be not sufficient for most broadcasters.
3. Okay, we pulled the bills for recording the album. What's next? Right, "Music" == "CD". Publishing. (Oh, crap, we forgot covers! - the work of cover designed is very expensive.) How mush CDs do you want? 100'000 - that would be 0.25 per disk. You can't pull that? - Okay you can make 1000 disks for $1-2.50 each.
4. Suppose we made it. Now we want to sell it. How would we do that? We contact the retailers. What they say us? - "Pay us money. People do not know you. The sales would be very slow. Etc." Right, to start selling we have to pay the bills of retailers so they would manage to keep your album on the shelfs.
5. How would we make people buy it? We need FM promotion. We come to FM stations: they wanna money since the only way they would accept your work as if it was commercial. (That's right, airing songs (which help promote radio) on behalf of commercials. That's why you need one good catching song - and short song in your album.)
I can go on, but I hope you got the spirit. I intentionally omitted steps like buying musical equipment and finding/renting room for trainings. But you can imaging that all that requires time and money. Lots of them.
BTW, how does Debian AMD64? Is it all 64bit system? Or with "sandbox" for 32bit applications? There is this nasty problem with binary packages some users love too much: Java, Flash plugin.
+100. Where are moderation points when I need them?
Stable v. Unstable is my favorite feature of Debian.
Stable's just blessing for servers. You go to shop and grab list of available parts. Then order only parts supported by Debian. It's always possible for servers (for desktops with wi-fi and 3d accels story is different). Once the server is up, Debian would install without a hitch. And it would go on running. In my case - the server I have set-up in year 2000 is still running Ok and was recently upgraded with new motherboard, raid mirror and RAM. I recently even tryed dist-upgrade of 3.0 to 3.1 over ssh and ZOMG! it worked without single flaw. That the true meaning of "stable".
Testing/unstable is always fun. For daily work as workstation, Debian's unstable was pretty Okay for me. I had really few problems: maintainers do great job at defining dependencies and apt-get is carefully at protecting installed software when there is no upgrade path available.
Hardware cost of the mobile phone is nothing compared to all the licensed buzz-words: GSM, UMTS, TDMA, CDMA, etc. That all stuff has to be coded and tested of course: in both hardware and software. Licensing costs for such hardware/software easily run into numbers with 6 (six) and more zeros at the end.
And embedded OSs they use - like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS - all can easily run into $30-200 per phone. Or you think they started thinking of Linux just for fun?
P.S. Reminds me why GSM won over technically superior CDMA in USA. The only "problem" with CDMA was stupid licensing and patent regime established by Qualcomm and Co (bunch of old companies afraid to be left aside of market.) 3GPP learned the lesson and UMTS had won again over US crowd - mostly due to friendly licensing. More or less all 3G wireless networks deployed around the world are derivatives of european UMTS. Licensing is no simple question to ignore.
P.P.S. Long time ago, one chinese CE manufacterer speculated that to produce $200 Palm PDA they need only about $40. So the numbers in article aren't really surprising.
Huh, they call it a "story". Script-kiddies were selling rootkits on IRC channles for a long time. Some rootkits were freely available with source code. I know admins who still use rootkits to manage PC parks they are responsible for. (Aparently rootkits are easier to use compared to Windows remote management a-la WMIC.)
M$ made sure that its new compiler produces code 100% compatible to.Net 2.0. Other free C/C++ compilers are terribly outdated (e.g. Borland's one). Intel wants money for it's compiler. So the only choice people now have to make efficient software - viruses/malware - under Windows is MinGW. With MinGW you get all those wonderful tools like autoconf/automake/friends which happily run uner MSYS under WinXPsp2. Why not to use the tools if they fit the purpose and make your life easier?
P.S. ZOMG!! Story implies that botnet developers - who might have guessed! - use closed-source methodologies to develop malware?!?! That MUST be stopped. </sarcasm>
And what would happen if you forget the password for the file with passwords?
Sorry my naivity. I keep my passwords (and serial keys) in plain text file. The solution works 100% with all OSs I work (and used to work) - Linux/Wind0ze/MacOSX. The only "security" feature - file is kept on external hard drive. Not intentionally, but after another totaled hard drive I bought external disk for backup. The file with passwords was one of few recovered from failed hard drive. Since then it's there.
All the WIPO/WTO (global treaties of that kind) have provisions for emergencies and strategical resources. (*) M$Windows is installed on 95% of computers in Europe => M$Windows is strategical resource. M$ pulls out of Europe => that would be emergency. EU/EC already has all the evidence against M$ - they'd make up case in WTO very quickly.
But, of course, M$ will not pull out of Europe. 28%(?) of M$ revenue comes from here. Such stunts on M$ behalf might easily bring down the whole company. Even without EC intervention.
(*) No independent country would ever put itself into complete dependence on treaty with another country. (The independence clause of respective constitutions is still there I hope.) Also, WIPO (part of UN) is not much relevant here. The international trade case could be only brought up in WTO anyway.
There was requirement about "native interface". Only when Opera will learn that double-click used to select text (not to open pop-up menus). When drag'n'drop will finally start working (try to drag URL from location bar to create link, try to drop link to open in new window/tab). When UI will be drawn using host OS (menus are always too thin - provided the amount crap in the menus - they are barely readable, controls don't use system font, etc etc etc) When tabs will be closing in the order they are on screen - not some random order. When tabs would be simply switching by Ctrl-Tab. And finally when about box will be what it is meant to be - dialog box.
Until then, tradition of Opera to break UI rules with every new release, does no good. Opera can called anything - but "native application." Unstandard keyboard shortcuts (easy to mistype), unstandard behavious (always confusing with other applications), etc. "Native application" doesn't mean "picture looks like everything else". Opera's "nativity" - is skin deep only. For definition of what native application I can only direct you (and hopefully Opera's devels) to sources: MS Guidelines for UI development & Apple's HIG & GNOME HIG. Read that before reinventing square wheels. Send that to Opera - probably they do not know about the guidelines.
Mozilla people spend lot of time making sure that people used to various OSs and various UI standards will feel themself comfortable. Specifically goal of Firefox was good integration with host OS - Windows or Linux - even Mac OS X support now improved greately. Br... Somebody stop me. I'm flaming.
Slashdot Mirror
That's stupid. He might turn money down. Now it's announced that proof is correct and that makes him candidate for that prize.
Even Russian newspapers do not have any official reaction of Perelman himself yet.
His (western) colleagues speculate that he might turn the award down. He is too far from normal life and money would distract him - so his friends say. That's speculation.
Nothing extraordinary really. In USSR, mathematics (as well physics) was just one of the top prioritized subjects. As one of my german friends compared me and his son, we soviet pupils have had about twice more mathematics during our school times.
Mathematics is not about numbers and problems - it teaches brain to think. Nothing more.
As if it was surprising. Advocating open standards is by no mean safe business... :-(
Not that I was fired for such, but you really had to see that at least once - all "the disadvantages" of using open standards as they are depicted by sales and marketdroids: competitors can "steal" your business!!!
Open source solves half of proprietary software problem. And Perens was one of the first who started working in direction of advertising open standards.
Many products try to establish and distance themselves by implementing "unique" (read: "non-interoperable") features. FLOSS is no exception from the rule. Ego is what starts and drives development and ego is what hinders and kills the development.
That's silly. Kid, you have to grow up one day and check that "real world" thing surrounding you.
Games and pornography serve the very same purpose: give our brain a break. There are really few option what usual work'a'droids like we all can do to break out of that damned circle of urban life: wake up, commute, breakfast, work, lunch, work, commute, diner, TV, sleep, wake up, etc. And if one has family, that basically means that one even has no week-ends to break out of that routine.
And there is nothing more to why games and pornography exist in particular and entertainment industry in general.
(N.B. Kids love to play in general since kids like to receive new experiences. And games are easiest way to get to wide range of experiences directly to our brain, no "real world" would ever deliver. No surprises here.)
P.S. On topic. No high-brow games? Guys, are you reading solely PRs from Electornic Arts, Microsoft & Sony??? There are lots of little (and little known about) freeware games around. Check out KDE games for one good example. Check what people do with PyGame package for example. Games now are very very very big business with very tight competition. There are no place left for entrepreneurs. That's why I'm directing you to independent community-developed games, most of them are freeware or even open source. No PRs though - games only. My last favorite one is VegaStrike: quite nice but taking time to learn space simulator (or Elite clone, whatever).
I advise you to check what you browser renders. Most of the CMS check what visiting browser is and generate XHTML if supported. (E.g. mozilla.org is mostly XHTML, http://browsehappy.com/, etc)
XHTML is XML-compliant and can be rendered by browsers faster. That is main advantage of XHTML. For real life HTML, it's next to impossible to verify validity. XHTML solves that problem allowing browsers to skip many checks and thus render pages considerably faster.
Wrong, since your advise has link to browser favored by you. In other words, it's not anymore about "browser supporting standard" but "standard browser we do support".
Link to http://browsehappy.com/browsers/ IMHO would be better. The site was established long ago and lists proper alternatives to IE for all platforms. It's bit too much into security and wasn't updated recently, yet it is a great starting point.
+10. Seems like time have come to implement subset of X/HTML w/o any bells and whistles - object/scrip included. As wide as X/HTML is used now that could become serious problem sooner than later. (E.g. many Mozilla problems fall into that category: JavaScript is run were it wasn't expected to be run.) Just like ActiveX now widely used by by spy/mal/ware: all what the little worms need to do is to tell IE to render some particular web page, in few easy steps ActiveX is launched and your PC is - voila! - already infected. JavaScript isn't powerful enough to create as much problems as ActiveX is capable of, but I do think that it is UNwise to allow plain message with pictures/links - what most of programmers want of HTML renderer - to do anything more than render plain message with pictures/links.
So that's the reason to keep €18-25 price mark on 20-25 years old recordings??? (I'm refereing to "Queen" - not a "Beatles" fan.)
That's looks insane to me.
+10. I'm ranting about that for more that 3 years - when BD/HD DVD groups both announced that they are going to use 5" diameter disk as it is used now for CD/DVD media. I'm not buying BD/HD-DVD on 5" anytime soon. I have already half of my flat covered by CD/DVD boxes. I do not want them anymore. They are way too big - they take too much space of my living room. They are too big - they do not fit my pockets. I'm not interested in 5" BD @ 50GB - but 3" BD @ 15-20GB would be very interesting. The BD/HD-DVD consortiums seems to be more interested in benchmarks - who has longest - not what really consumers want. P.S. SD card sized media is like dream at moment. No way you would reach current price milestone set by DVD: $0.25 per gigabyte. Not even close to $1/GB. Flash SD cards are now about $50/GB... :-(
All SACD sold here in Europe have CD compatibility layer. I have bunch if SACDs I have bought thinking that I was buying CDs. And they play in my CD player just fine.
It was the bet of SACD. Not to rush transition, but to saturate market with dual layer disks (SACD + CD) what would help in long term to sell SACD players too.
In other words, SACD must have taught us that it must be CD compatible to sell. SACD sells well, since most people buy them as normal CDs - not specifically as SACDs.
Anyway, with advent of iTMS/subscription services, business-wise spending money of new disk format seems to be total waste to me. What does Warner really think? Does not it have already enough money loosing business to take care of?
Provided that would be found any serious problems and Jobs would be found to be related to the problems.
For financial stuff public companies have CFOs - chief financial officer. It's not responsibility of CEO to overview SEC reports - it's responsibility of CFO.
In other words, I beleive Peter Oppenheimer (?, if Google's not lying) as current Apple CFO has more to lose.
Too late! The one of the reasons of rise of nVidia and fall of SGI was strategy of SGI to move from graphics to server space. SGI basically sold all of its IP to nVidia at the time they have had a 3D graphics patent dispute. Many people fired along with departure from graphics had been picked up by nVidia. (One guy commented with that info in response to The Register article covering SGI bankruptcy filing.)
I kept an eye on OpenGL/OpenAL/OpenML/Khronos/etc announcements last 5(6?) years. The news gradually were changing: before they were signed mostly by somebuddy@sgi.com - now pal@nvidia.com all over the place. So the story didn't surprised me at all.
From all what I can tell, most Windows users have fear of tech support. In all my years of helping people with Linux, I found it to be very very easily supportable. Hardest part is to convince user that there is nothing in Linux monstrous like e.g. Windows' registry, that even if user screwed something up - all the damage can be easily recovered.
Still even after that, most people are very reluctant to call non-free support. They just say that "computer broke". Though most of the time they wouldn't hesitate to bring the PC to my place - just like TV - for "repair".
I think that Freespire/Linspire/whatever has hard road ahead to overcome. Good luck. We definitely need more people like Michael Robertson. Not a personal fan, but I always admired people trying to achieve more.
Reading article before commenting is useful sometimes. It's precisely about municipality move to Linux - after successful pilot in education.
18Mln vs. 190k euros? I'd say it doesn't hurt to try.
From my personal experience, 5 years ago Linux had problem of application availability and the quality of the applications. Now, most problems boil down to "Wind0ze does it differently". IOW, If you deploy Linux-only environment such problems don't exist.
I once worked for three years in Linux-only house. After 4 years on WinNT4. That was best experience of my life: easy installation and recovery, painless networking, simple backup, no-brainer collaboration with others, etc. Perl, python, apache/php/mysql, cvs, gcc, gdb, vim, etc - all stuff already installed for your there. And it all works! All servers are only click away. But of course the experience depends on kind of work you are doing. I'm software developer and Linux known to be developers' "nirvana".
You are so wrong.
It's possible to make that process secure. And in fact something similar is already done by SELinux: any un-authorized modifications of files would render the files unaccessible. It's simple mater of giving every user unique key.
In other words, using RSA terminlogy, any vote has to be signed with: key of voter, key of software and key of hardware. That would make quite close match to ballot trail. Later on, votes can be verified by checking the signatures. Is there any voter with such key? Was the key of software in set of allowed software versions? Was the vote cast on certifier hardware with proper key and serial number?
That would be magnitude harder to crack: you would have to find key of a particular voter and key of particular voting machine. Software versions since they are few are easier to guess.
And such measures are not all that complicated to implement. For example voter keys can be generated randomly right before casting vote. The key needs to be stored separately (only for verification purposes). Key is generated, backed up and stored to (e.g. smart) card. Then (with the card) person casts (and signs) his vote. The vote is also signed by key of software. Then serial number of casting machine added and all that again signed by machine's key. The personal key is then erased from the card and if needed it can be printed and given to the voter. All that can be done automatically.
I'll tell you the reality of Russia.
In Russia (with current level of corruption) people are afraid more of police itself rather than of criminals (police is supposed to protect people from). Again. Several polls have shown that 40% of people see real threat coming from police and only about 25% threat of being offended by criminals.
That's the real life effect of corruption: from standpoint of people with power there is no difference between normal people and criminals.
As I see it from over the pond, US is moving in the same direction.
Then probably I guess you never tried to record, publish and promote your own album. You can pick lots of funny information by yourself.
There is no other word for that business but "mafia". They are middle man, standing between creators and fans. They rob artists of what they create - under guise of helping them with all the bureaucracy and formalities (All the bureaucracy and formalities help nobody else but recording companies - and quite questionable why it is there in first place). Then they force DRMs on consumers and restrictive contracts on broadcasters makeing sure that you get the work of artist only from them and only on condition they have set.
FYI.
Have you ever wondered by some crap like "Britney Spears"/etc make so high in hit lists? I asked that question to DJ of one german FM radio I met in pub. (Well, Okay, I asked why they have for every hour of good new music they 12 hours of old trash. Do you start guessing how the questions relate?) Right, RIAA (or its german face Sony BMG) sets in (very long) contract conditions on programming of FM stations with restriction like: "two new promoted songs cannot be aired in the same hour", "new promoted song has to be separated at least by 5(?) minutes from any other song", "you can't air more than 4 news songs per hour", "you can't air new or promoted song next to another promoted or new song respectively." I can't tell the restrictions precisely. But I hope you get the spirit of the conditions boradcaster have to deal with.
The goal of such silly conditions to make sure that some stupid talentless voiceless signer(in) would catch your attention. No way you would get away from that promoted song: first they assault your brain with 100 times repeated hit of 80s and then BA-BAM! new song. No way human brain (exhausted by the commercials and old crap before) would manage to reject the new song. The content of the song is irrelevant - it just has to be new/different.
Conditions in the contract make sure that song would stand out on the dull background. And here you have it: some talentless voiceless macho gets on top of hit lists, while probaly having only sex appeal.
Often, they just approach young performer with offer "Do you wanna us to make you the star???" Who of beginners in his/her right ming would turn down such offer.
Step by step.
1. Renting recording studio is very expensive. Very.
2. Hiring professional sound editor is very very expensive. You can edit by yourself - but quality would be not sufficient for most broadcasters.
3. Okay, we pulled the bills for recording the album. What's next? Right, "Music" == "CD". Publishing. (Oh, crap, we forgot covers! - the work of cover designed is very expensive.) How mush CDs do you want? 100'000 - that would be 0.25 per disk. You can't pull that? - Okay you can make 1000 disks for $1-2.50 each.
4. Suppose we made it. Now we want to sell it. How would we do that? We contact the retailers. What they say us? - "Pay us money. People do not know you. The sales would be very slow. Etc." Right, to start selling we have to pay the bills of retailers so they would manage to keep your album on the shelfs.
5. How would we make people buy it? We need FM promotion. We come to FM stations: they wanna money since the only way they would accept your work as if it was commercial. (That's right, airing songs (which help promote radio) on behalf of commercials. That's why you need one good catching song - and short song in your album.)
I can go on, but I hope you got the spirit. I intentionally omitted steps like buying musical equipment and finding/renting room for trainings. But you can imaging that all that requires time and money. Lots of them.
And now enter recording compani
BTW, how does Debian AMD64? Is it all 64bit system? Or with "sandbox" for 32bit applications? There is this nasty problem with binary packages some users love too much: Java, Flash plugin.
+100. Where are moderation points when I need them?
Stable v. Unstable is my favorite feature of Debian.
Stable's just blessing for servers. You go to shop and grab list of available parts. Then order only parts supported by Debian. It's always possible for servers (for desktops with wi-fi and 3d accels story is different). Once the server is up, Debian would install without a hitch. And it would go on running. In my case - the server I have set-up in year 2000 is still running Ok and was recently upgraded with new motherboard, raid mirror and RAM. I recently even tryed dist-upgrade of 3.0 to 3.1 over ssh and ZOMG! it worked without single flaw. That the true meaning of "stable".
Testing/unstable is always fun. For daily work as workstation, Debian's unstable was pretty Okay for me. I had really few problems: maintainers do great job at defining dependencies and apt-get is carefully at protecting installed software when there is no upgrade path available.
+10
Hardware cost of the mobile phone is nothing compared to all the licensed buzz-words: GSM, UMTS, TDMA, CDMA, etc. That all stuff has to be coded and tested of course: in both hardware and software. Licensing costs for such hardware/software easily run into numbers with 6 (six) and more zeros at the end.
And embedded OSs they use - like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS - all can easily run into $30-200 per phone. Or you think they started thinking of Linux just for fun?
P.S. Reminds me why GSM won over technically superior CDMA in USA. The only "problem" with CDMA was stupid licensing and patent regime established by Qualcomm and Co (bunch of old companies afraid to be left aside of market.) 3GPP learned the lesson and UMTS had won again over US crowd - mostly due to friendly licensing. More or less all 3G wireless networks deployed around the world are derivatives of european UMTS. Licensing is no simple question to ignore.
P.P.S. Long time ago, one chinese CE manufacterer speculated that to produce $200 Palm PDA they need only about $40. So the numbers in article aren't really surprising.
Huh, they call it a "story". Script-kiddies were selling rootkits on IRC channles for a long time. Some rootkits were freely available with source code. I know admins who still use rootkits to manage PC parks they are responsible for. (Aparently rootkits are easier to use compared to Windows remote management a-la WMIC.)
M$ made sure that its new compiler produces code 100% compatible to .Net 2.0. Other free C/C++ compilers are terribly outdated (e.g. Borland's one). Intel wants money for it's compiler. So the only choice people now have to make efficient software - viruses/malware - under Windows is MinGW. With MinGW you get all those wonderful tools like autoconf/automake/friends which happily run uner MSYS under WinXPsp2. Why not to use the tools if they fit the purpose and make your life easier?
P.S. ZOMG!! Story implies that botnet developers - who might have guessed! - use closed-source methodologies to develop malware?!?! That MUST be stopped. </sarcasm>
And what would happen if you forget the password for the file with passwords?
Sorry my naivity. I keep my passwords (and serial keys) in plain text file. The solution works 100% with all OSs I work (and used to work) - Linux/Wind0ze/MacOSX. The only "security" feature - file is kept on external hard drive. Not intentionally, but after another totaled hard drive I bought external disk for backup. The file with passwords was one of few recovered from failed hard drive. Since then it's there.
All the WIPO/WTO (global treaties of that kind) have provisions for emergencies and strategical resources. (*) M$Windows is installed on 95% of computers in Europe => M$Windows is strategical resource. M$ pulls out of Europe => that would be emergency. EU/EC already has all the evidence against M$ - they'd make up case in WTO very quickly.
But, of course, M$ will not pull out of Europe. 28%(?) of M$ revenue comes from here. Such stunts on M$ behalf might easily bring down the whole company. Even without EC intervention. (*) No independent country would ever put itself into complete dependence on treaty with another country. (The independence clause of respective constitutions is still there I hope.) Also, WIPO (part of UN) is not much relevant here. The international trade case could be only brought up in WTO anyway.
There was requirement about "native interface". Only when Opera will learn that double-click used to select text (not to open pop-up menus). When drag'n'drop will finally start working (try to drag URL from location bar to create link, try to drop link to open in new window/tab). When UI will be drawn using host OS (menus are always too thin - provided the amount crap in the menus - they are barely readable, controls don't use system font, etc etc etc) When tabs will be closing in the order they are on screen - not some random order. When tabs would be simply switching by Ctrl-Tab. And finally when about box will be what it is meant to be - dialog box.
Until then, tradition of Opera to break UI rules with every new release, does no good. Opera can called anything - but "native application." Unstandard keyboard shortcuts (easy to mistype), unstandard behavious (always confusing with other applications), etc. "Native application" doesn't mean "picture looks like everything else". Opera's "nativity" - is skin deep only. For definition of what native application I can only direct you (and hopefully Opera's devels) to sources: MS Guidelines for UI development & Apple's HIG & GNOME HIG. Read that before reinventing square wheels. Send that to Opera - probably they do not know about the guidelines.
Mozilla people spend lot of time making sure that people used to various OSs and various UI standards will feel themself comfortable. Specifically goal of Firefox was good integration with host OS - Windows or Linux - even Mac OS X support now improved greately. Br... Somebody stop me. I'm flaming.