Look, Mr. Spelling Fascist, we computer geeks invent new vocabulary all the time. Bogosity/bogons/quantum bogodynamics (check the Jargon file). Blog (web log). Mob (mobile). Vaxen (plural of DEC VAX, by association with oxen, because they are reliable but slow). Boxen (plural of box, by association with vaxen). Thunk (crazy piece of assembly for transferring code between different ABI's). Foo/bar/baz/wombat (uncertain origin). So if words that aren't in the OED scare you, you better stop reading slashdot right now.
Now, as for "virii". Ancient Romans never used the word "virus" in the plural. Furthermore, didn't write down the rules for how such a plural should be constructed. So it's not like "virii" is replacing a good old Latin plural - there was no plural before, we were forced to construct one.
it is important that the opposition candidate, Viktor Yuschenko, win in the run off of the presidential election next Sunday
Repeat after me: Both Candidates Totally Suck. Yuschenko might be 10% less corrupt than Yanukovich, but he is 100% more corrupt than an "acceptable presidential candidate". The only difference between the two, as far as I am concerned, is that Yanukovich has the TV and Putin on his side, while Yuschenko has the crazy West-Ukrainians.
How much money did they steal from you? Say, hypothetically, you get 500 spams in a month per account (unusually many). Say each weighs 10K (a bit on the high side). That's still only ~5M of transfer per month per user - the cost to you is negligible, unless you operate something like Hotmail.
Indeed. Spam is annoying, and takes up some bandwidth, but I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of it. If you don't like reading spam (some weird people actually do want to buy penis and breast enhancement toolkits) - get a filter.
The way I see it, spam should be a minor offense - if you don't give jail time to someone who TP's your shrubbery, you shouldn't be giving jail time to a spammer.
I'm the Professor at Maryland who has spent the last two plus years collecting the business plans and related documents. [...] Sounds like we need to improve the search functionality so you can find stuff you want to see.
Indeed. Also, an overwhelming percentage of entries seem to have no info on them besides the company name and description. Maybe the "browse by one or more documents" should be made a checkbox instead of one of the browse options?
For an IM client, intergration with the desktop is paramount IMHO.
I don't see why. An IM client has fairly unsual UI requirements, so it seems unfair for it to follow the look'n'feel standards of the DE too closely. The only argument for integration with the DE is the contact list (being able to see if the guy who sent you an email is online), which isn't compelling enough IMHO.
I keep switching back to Kopete
I think Kopete is nice, but it suffers because its UI is too KDE-ish. Having to follow two levels in the context menus to do common actions just so that the structure of the context menu follows the KDE standards? Blargh.
Who cares - no rule of English grammar applies to more than 70% of the cases it's supposed to apply to. If you start with a language that doesn't make any sense, why not develop it into even more twisted and esoteric forms?
Besides, "virii" is geek slang. It's just as valid (or invalid) as "linux boxen", "1K == 1024", or "pwn4ge".
Excellent ideas. Nobody has been paying attention to the layer between the kernel and the GUI.
If I may add something in a similar vein: I switched to Gentoo from Debian, and over the course of a year gradually discovered dozens of Gentoo-only tools and configs (genlop, gensync, quickpkg, euse, equery, ebuild, esearch, opengl-update, rc-update, revdep-rebuild, the/etc/portage hierarchy, the FEATURES shell variable, etc.) These aren't really documented in a single place, and a Gentoo newbie (even one with years of other Linux experience) will never know about them. The same is true of any other large distro. So why not make a "Distro control panel" with an interface to all of these tools, and documentation for what they all do? That way, people won't be forced to write inferior buggy versions of equery on their own, only to find out that they've wasted a day of their life...
Anyone else have the linux client segfaulting? Also, it seems to be one major version number behind the windows/osx clients, and appears not to have been updated in about a year...
Ok. The most recent version (July 20, 2004) of Law of the Russian Federation on Authors' Rights and Related Rights reads:
Article 39: Use of a recording, published for commercial purposes, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording or the performer
1. As an exception to the provisions of articles 37 and 38 of this Law, it is permitted, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording that was published for commercial purposes, or of the performer whose performance was recorded in the recording, but with the payment of royalty:
1. to play the recording publically
2. to broadcast the recording
3. to transmit the recording over cable for general access
1.1 [liberal translation] Starting on September 1, 2006, the "play the recording publically" part no longer applies.
2. The collection, distribution, and payment of royalties from part 1 of the current article is done by one of the organizations which governs the rights of recording manufacturers and performers on a collective basis (see article 44 of the current law) in accordance with the agreement between these organizations. If this agreement does not provide otherwise, the royalty is split equally between the recording manufacturer and the performer.
3. The size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by the agreement between the user of the recording or the union (association) of such users, on the one hand, and the organizations that govern the rights of manufacturers of phonograms and performers, on the other hand; in the case where no such agreement is made, the size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by a special organ of the Russian Federation.
The size of the royalty is to be determined for each type of use of the recording.
4. Users of recordings must provide to the organization mentioned in part 2 of the current article the data containing precise information about the number of uses of the recording, and also other information and documents necessary for the collection and distribution of royalties.
Here is what ROMS (Russian Society for Multimedia and Digital Networks) has to say about this matter:
ROMS gives you [the content provider] the opportunity to make a single licensing agreement with ROMS instead of innumerable agreements with each of the copyright holders. According to this agreement, the user must pay a royalty that will be distributed to the copyright holders, and to provide information about the recordings used, while ROMS guarantees (as long as the user fulfills all of the contract obligations) to settle any possible monetary claims against the user from the holder of copyrights and related rights.
As far as I can tell, ROMS only distributes royalties to its members. Thus, if you are really losing a lot of money from Russian sites, I suggest you look into ROMS membership.
How would the average between Fox and the Clinton News Network be to the right?
Please recall CNN's coverage of the most recent invasion of Iraq, of Colin Powell's powerpoint presentation in the UN, or of the search for WMD's. Sometimes it seems that whenever a CNN reporter meets a US general, the reporter's first reaction is to uncritically drop his pants and apply lubrication. In terms of foreign policy coverage, CNN is the obedient servant of whichever party is in power.
In the US, journalists that don't "play ball" get bumped down. Instead of getting immediate responses they will get put on hold and generally shunted around.
True very true. In Russia, a journalist who used to cover the Kremlim published a book (Bayki Kremlevskogo Diggera) denouncing the Putin administration's policy of denying news access to undesirable journalists. The book caused a major sensation, and I believe it was banned. The sad thing is, Bush's administration is using very similar tactics to train their cadre of pet journalists, and no-one seems to care...
Reading the coverage on CNN and other US news sources, it's hard to see any real analysis of issues that matter.
The way it seems to me, UK newspapers are biased, content-free, low-brow, and filled with scandals, while the TV news is done pretty well. In the US, it tends to be the other way around.
True objective news reporting can only be had by watching Fox and CNN, then figure out the middle between them.
A middle ground between CNN and Fox would be somewhere far far right of center. If you want balanced coverage, you should at the very least add BBC to your mix.
I use gcc 3.4 on Gentoo and have only encountered a few issues with it
Off the top of my head, I can count openoffice (fails with 3.4.any), iobench (failed with 3.4.1 on athlon-xp), arts (fails with 3.4.any hardened), kdelibs (failed with 3.4.1 hardened on athlon-xp), mozilla-1.7.2 (failed for me with 3.4.something), and gimp-2.0.2 (failed with gcc-3.4.1 hardened, I think).
I am sure 3.4 produces better code, but it is more strict about the syntax it accepts, and before version 3.4.2, it was kinda flaky on some platforms.
but while my chances of being able to fix gcc-4.0 may be infintessimal, they're infinitely higher than the (zero) chance of my being able to fix icc (legally)
I suppose the chances of a pig spontaneously sprouting wings and rocket engines and flying to the moon are, technically, infinitely higher than zero...
One of the main reasons I was looking forward to the new GCC versions was faster compile times for C++. Yet it seems that for povray (the only c++ source in the benchmark), the compile times consistently get worse with newer versions of gcc. Does no-one care about people who actually compile kde?
it's best not to get in the habit of becoming locked into any proprietary platform. How likely is it that features on which one could come to depend will be kept available on free platforms
And how likely is GCC to continue supporting the features you love? In case you haven't been checking, gcc-3.4 has removed some of its extensions to C grammar (the old joke used to go that gcc can accept a perl script as valid input). I use Gentoo, and after gcc-3.4 was released, I frequently encountered programs that refused to compile with 3.4. If anything, proprietary software (especially Microsoft's) tends to emphasize backwards compatibility over all other considerations.
If gcc-4.0 makes your source unusable, will you patch the compiler? How long do you think it will take you to familiarize yourself with the source enough to figure out where the undesirable changes were made?
Very true. Primary cause of disaster = plant engineers who didn't understand the reactor internals and who ignored safety procedures.
Let's see what went wrong:
RMBK reactors are unpredictable at power levels below ~25%. Reactor engineers lowered power to 1%. Doing so, I believe, required modifying some programs in the reactor computer,
Emergency cooling systems prevent meltdowns. Reactor engineers disconnected the systems.
In addition, reactor engineers disconnected the emergency scram switches (which would have tripped several times during this moronic exercise).
Control rods regulate reaction rate; on RBMK's, they can't be reinserted quickly once you take them out. Reactor engineers pulled all control rods out all the way.
Half the recirculation pumps were switched off, causing coolant to stagnate in the core.
Reactor engineers did not remember that at very low power, the RBMK core tends to be poisoned by radioactive xenon and iodine, which slow down the reaction. But as soon as a large enough fraction of them decay, Boom!, the reaction suddenly shoots up. The fact that operators ignored this meant they didn't really know how the reactor worked.
More than anything, the Chernobyl disaster reminds me of a Windows user who disables the firewall and antivirus just to install that nifty Explorer toolbar. The difference being that an average Windows user doesn't kill thousands of people through his stupidity...
Slashdot Mirror
wormii and trojanii [...] there's no such thing
Look, Mr. Spelling Fascist, we computer geeks invent new vocabulary all the time. Bogosity/bogons/quantum bogodynamics (check the Jargon file). Blog (web log). Mob (mobile). Vaxen (plural of DEC VAX, by association with oxen, because they are reliable but slow). Boxen (plural of box, by association with vaxen). Thunk (crazy piece of assembly for transferring code between different ABI's). Foo/bar/baz/wombat (uncertain origin). So if words that aren't in the OED scare you, you better stop reading slashdot right now.
Now, as for "virii". Ancient Romans never used the word "virus" in the plural. Furthermore, didn't write down the rules for how such a plural should be constructed. So it's not like "virii" is replacing a good old Latin plural - there was no plural before, we were forced to construct one.
it is important that the opposition candidate, Viktor Yuschenko, win in the run off of the presidential election next Sunday
Repeat after me: Both Candidates Totally Suck. Yuschenko might be 10% less corrupt than Yanukovich, but he is 100% more corrupt than an "acceptable presidential candidate". The only difference between the two, as far as I am concerned, is that Yanukovich has the TV and Putin on his side, while Yuschenko has the crazy West-Ukrainians.
How much money did they steal from you? Say, hypothetically, you get 500 spams in a month per account (unusually many). Say each weighs 10K (a bit on the high side). That's still only ~5M of transfer per month per user - the cost to you is negligible, unless you operate something like Hotmail.
Indeed. Spam is annoying, and takes up some bandwidth, but I don't understand why people make such a big deal out of it. If you don't like reading spam (some weird people actually do want to buy penis and breast enhancement toolkits) - get a filter.
The way I see it, spam should be a minor offense - if you don't give jail time to someone who TP's your shrubbery, you shouldn't be giving jail time to a spammer.
I'm the Professor at Maryland who has spent the last two plus years collecting the business plans and related documents. [...] Sounds like we need to improve the search functionality so you can find stuff you want to see.
Indeed. Also, an overwhelming percentage of entries seem to have no info on them besides the company name and description. Maybe the "browse by one or more documents" should be made a checkbox instead of one of the browse options?
Works perfectly here - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041027 Firefox/0.10.1
I am using the plugin from Gnome's librsvg-2.8.1 (/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libmozsvgdec.so)
For an IM client, intergration with the desktop is paramount IMHO.
I don't see why. An IM client has fairly unsual UI requirements, so it seems unfair for it to follow the look'n'feel standards of the DE too closely. The only argument for integration with the DE is the contact list (being able to see if the guy who sent you an email is online), which isn't compelling enough IMHO.
I keep switching back to Kopete
I think Kopete is nice, but it suffers because its UI is too KDE-ish. Having to follow two levels in the context menus to do common actions just so that the structure of the context menu follows the KDE standards? Blargh.
Who cares - no rule of English grammar applies to more than 70% of the cases it's supposed to apply to. If you start with a language that doesn't make any sense, why not develop it into even more twisted and esoteric forms?
Besides, "virii" is geek slang. It's just as valid (or invalid) as "linux boxen", "1K == 1024", or "pwn4ge".
Excellent ideas. Nobody has been paying attention to the layer between the kernel and the GUI.
/etc/portage hierarchy, the FEATURES shell variable, etc.) These aren't really documented in a single place, and a Gentoo newbie (even one with years of other Linux experience) will never know about them. The same is true of any other large distro. So why not make a "Distro control panel" with an interface to all of these tools, and documentation for what they all do? That way, people won't be forced to write inferior buggy versions of equery on their own, only to find out that they've wasted a day of their life...
If I may add something in a similar vein: I switched to Gentoo from Debian, and over the course of a year gradually discovered dozens of Gentoo-only tools and configs (genlop, gensync, quickpkg, euse, equery, ebuild, esearch, opengl-update, rc-update, revdep-rebuild, the
Anyone else have the linux client segfaulting? Also, it seems to be one major version number behind the windows/osx clients, and appears not to have been updated in about a year...
Ok. The most recent version (July 20, 2004) of Law of the Russian Federation on Authors' Rights and Related Rights reads:
Article 39: Use of a recording, published for commercial purposes, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording or the performer
1. As an exception to the provisions of articles 37 and 38 of this Law, it is permitted, without the agreement of the manufacturer of the recording that was published for commercial purposes, or of the performer whose performance was recorded in the recording, but with the payment of royalty:
1. to play the recording publically
2. to broadcast the recording
3. to transmit the recording over cable for general access
1.1 [liberal translation] Starting on September 1, 2006, the "play the recording publically" part no longer applies.
2. The collection, distribution, and payment of royalties from part 1 of the current article is done by one of the organizations which governs the rights of recording manufacturers and performers on a collective basis (see article 44 of the current law) in accordance with the agreement between these organizations. If this agreement does not provide otherwise, the royalty is split equally between the recording manufacturer and the performer.
3. The size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by the agreement between the user of the recording or the union (association) of such users, on the one hand, and the organizations that govern the rights of manufacturers of phonograms and performers, on the other hand; in the case where no such agreement is made, the size of the royalty and conditions for its payment are determined by a special organ of the Russian Federation.
The size of the royalty is to be determined for each type of use of the recording.
4. Users of recordings must provide to the organization mentioned in part 2 of the current article the data containing precise information about the number of uses of the recording, and also other information and documents necessary for the collection and distribution of royalties.
Here is what ROMS (Russian Society for Multimedia and Digital Networks) has to say about this matter:
ROMS gives you [the content provider] the opportunity to make a single licensing agreement with ROMS instead of innumerable agreements with each of the copyright holders. According to this agreement, the user must pay a royalty that will be distributed to the copyright holders, and to provide information about the recordings used, while ROMS guarantees (as long as the user fulfills all of the contract obligations) to settle any possible monetary claims against the user from the holder of copyrights and related rights.
As far as I can tell, ROMS only distributes royalties to its members. Thus, if you are really losing a lot of money from Russian sites, I suggest you look into ROMS membership.
Links: http://www.roms.ru/, http://www.copyrighter.ru/full/apispnew.htm
How would the average between Fox and the Clinton News Network be to the right?
Please recall CNN's coverage of the most recent invasion of Iraq, of Colin Powell's powerpoint presentation in the UN, or of the search for WMD's. Sometimes it seems that whenever a CNN reporter meets a US general, the reporter's first reaction is to uncritically drop his pants and apply lubrication. In terms of foreign policy coverage, CNN is the obedient servant of whichever party is in power.
In the US, journalists that don't "play ball" get bumped down. Instead of getting immediate responses they will get put on hold and generally shunted around.
True very true. In Russia, a journalist who used to cover the Kremlim published a book (Bayki Kremlevskogo Diggera) denouncing the Putin administration's policy of denying news access to undesirable journalists. The book caused a major sensation, and I believe it was banned. The sad thing is, Bush's administration is using very similar tactics to train their cadre of pet journalists, and no-one seems to care...
Reading the coverage on CNN and other US news sources, it's hard to see any real analysis of issues that matter.
The way it seems to me, UK newspapers are biased, content-free, low-brow, and filled with scandals, while the TV news is done pretty well. In the US, it tends to be the other way around.
True objective news reporting can only be had by watching Fox and CNN, then figure out the middle between them.
A middle ground between CNN and Fox would be somewhere far far right of center. If you want balanced coverage, you should at the very least add BBC to your mix.
I use gcc 3.4 on Gentoo and have only encountered a few issues with it
Off the top of my head, I can count openoffice (fails with 3.4.any), iobench (failed with 3.4.1 on athlon-xp), arts (fails with 3.4.any hardened), kdelibs (failed with 3.4.1 hardened on athlon-xp), mozilla-1.7.2 (failed for me with 3.4.something), and gimp-2.0.2 (failed with gcc-3.4.1 hardened, I think).
I am sure 3.4 produces better code, but it is more strict about the syntax it accepts, and before version 3.4.2, it was kinda flaky on some platforms.
Brilliant! Mister Coward, your troll is truly creative and deserves our applause.
Billy Gates is asking why a comment insulting open source was modded -1?
This is a classic...
Compilers for {Solaris, Irix, HPUX, etc} : {Sun's, SGI's, HP's, etc's}, gcc
Compilers for Linux: gcc, icc, and Portland's pgcc.
Compilers for Windows: Microsoft's, Borland's, icc, gcc-mingw
Most modern OS's, not just Linux, don't have much in the way of compiler choice.
but while my chances of being able to fix gcc-4.0 may be infintessimal, they're infinitely higher than the (zero) chance of my being able to fix icc (legally)
I suppose the chances of a pig spontaneously sprouting wings and rocket engines and flying to the moon are, technically, infinitely higher than zero...
One of the main reasons I was looking forward to the new GCC versions was faster compile times for C++. Yet it seems that for povray (the only c++ source in the benchmark), the compile times consistently get worse with newer versions of gcc. Does no-one care about people who actually compile kde?
it's best not to get in the habit of becoming locked into any proprietary platform. How likely is it that features on which one could come to depend will be kept available on free platforms
And how likely is GCC to continue supporting the features you love? In case you haven't been checking, gcc-3.4 has removed some of its extensions to C grammar (the old joke used to go that gcc can accept a perl script as valid input). I use Gentoo, and after gcc-3.4 was released, I frequently encountered programs that refused to compile with 3.4. If anything, proprietary software (especially Microsoft's) tends to emphasize backwards compatibility over all other considerations.
If gcc-4.0 makes your source unusable, will you patch the compiler? How long do you think it will take you to familiarize yourself with the source enough to figure out where the undesirable changes were made?
More than anything, the Chernobyl disaster reminds me of a Windows user who disables the firewall and antivirus just to install that nifty Explorer toolbar. The difference being that an average Windows user doesn't kill thousands of people through his stupidity...