I love getting pre-paid business return envelopes in my mail. That way I can just send all the stuff that they send me right back to them. They pay to send it to me, and they pay to get it all back from me.
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it. Technically, that should tell them to stop sending to me since they're just wasting their time, but it proves that I'm reading their ads (rather than just dumping the junk mail), and I would much rather they get the feedback that "the generic recipient" is pissed off at their mass mailing, rather than any one particular person.
(On a side note: yes, I did try once specifically respond to a charity organization to take me off their list. I said that I would no longer contribute (I had contributed once) and could they please save my sanity --as well as their costs-- by taking me off the list. I kept getting more and more physical junk mail, almost as if they were being encouraged by my entreaties to stop. I threatened to diss them for wasting their income from donations, and I am making good on that threat with this post.)
I can't understand the negativity. Sure Microsoft has an unpleasant past, but this is a good move on their part and should be met with nothing less than praise. We want to encourage more behavior like this.
You are right. This is a great step forward. However, I think the Slashdot community, with its cynical eye on Microsoft, is reminding us to take this in the proper context. It remains to be seen whether this is the beginning of a slow but steady change of course for the world's largest software company, or whether this is a fake-out to fool people into thinking that Microsoft is nice.
Personally, I suspect that this reflects internal conflict within Microsoft, with some portions of the behemoth trying to do something good, while another faction still trying to squeeze money out of Microsoft's unique position in the software world.
In any case, remember how some people would say, "You always complain about Microsoft! What would it take for you to admit that Microsoft is doing something good?"
#2 on the list was: Stop hijacking the HTML standard and make a compliant browser! Then they put out IE7. (Not perfect, but a heckuva lot better than IE6!)
#1 on the list was: Open up the Word document file format. Okay, so they've done that. (Again, not perfect, but a heckuva lot better than what went on before!)
Congrats, Microsoft. You did it. A little late in coming, and you really didn't impress us with your OOXML fiasco waving that money around, but I'm willing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude to see whether it's still those same money-grubbing upper level managers that are in control, or whether this really is a new day at Microsoft.
I've had no problems with MyDomain.com. Yearly renewal at $9/yr. This includes email redirection; you can specify that various email addresses get redirected to different addresses, and a "none of the above" wildcard email address goes to yet another address you specify. It's great having disposable email addresses. (Unfortunately, doesn't do wildcard matching.)
Web sites get directed to their web server which consists of a single frame filling the page, and the contents of the frame are whichever web site you want to redirect it to. (You can also get it to actually point to another web site, but I haven't tried this so I can't say anything about it.)
I signed up with them because I was impressed by the technical support forums, which are open to non-customers. This was a few years ago; hope they're still just as good.
If the guesses are distributed around the correct value...
and you said
any symmetric distribution would work as long as it was was centered around the correct solution
You are both right. However, GP is more correct than you.
You speak of a distribution where the expected value is the correct solution, but you also said that it was a "symmetric" distribution (and thus it would be "centered" around the correct solution). This is sufficient but not necessary. Amazingly enough, no matter how asymmetric, skewed or weird-looking a distribution is, if you take the average of enough independent guesses, the distribution turns into a Gaussian bell curve.
For example, if you have a fair die, with faces numbered 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, and 7, then most of the time you will roll a 1, but once in a while you will roll a 7. The average value rolled is 2. If you roll the die, say, 4 times, the average will be 2 --with a somewhat bell-shaped curve. If you roll the die 20 times, it will be pretty much bell-shaped (and symmetric). If you roll it 100 times, it's a near-perfect bell.
Take a look at the Central Limit Theorem for more info. When I first learned this in stochastics, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Math can be stunningly beautiful sometimes.
Make it a true geeks trick. Put the magnets on the inside of the fender spelling out "Very Small Penis". Then shake some iron filings over it. It'll keep trying to reform the words as he wipes it off and each day when you walk by it just sprinkle some more filings over the spot to keep the joke going. See how long it takes him to figure out they are on the inside
It seems to me, intuitively, that this will not work due to the ferromagnetism of the fender, which is presumably metal. That very property which allows the magnets to cling to the inside of the fender will also capture most of the magnetic field lines, meaning that it won't attract the iron filings (or will attract them evenly, so that they don't spell out any words).
For the words to appear, the material separating the magnets from the iron filings would have to be unaffected by magnets; for example, if you put the magnets under a sheet of plastic or wood, then the iron filings will clump according to the placement of the magnets. On the other hand, if the fender is made of plastic, the magnets won't stick to it in the first place.
That's just my intuition; can anyone correct me on this?
I have mod points but want to respond because others have been giving flippant responses.
"Funny" is an upmod that doesn't affect karma, so my guess is someone thought your post interesting to read but did not want to reward your user acct, just your post.
Similarly, posts that are so wittily funny that the poster deserves a reward are sometimes upmodded "+1 Informative" or some such, since "+1 Funny" doesn't reward the poster.
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Be careful of baring your soul and seeking sympathy from a faceless geek-agglomerate like Slashdot. If you want a bar-like atmosphere, IRC might be a better choice.
I'm sure that Firefox has quite a bit of QA done to it... but it's usefulness relies too much on extensions, which we don't that many assurances about. I'm guessing you didn't read the article. The breakdown came with the fact that the signature of the trojan was unknown at the time it was uploaded and so the anti-virus scan on the extension came up clean. This had nothing to do with a failure of OSS but with the fact that at the time it was an unknown trojan. It sounds like you're saying, "But this is just because the trojan was unknown at the time! If the evil hackers had used a known trojan, Mozilla would have detected it!" If you are asking whether Mozilla failed to virus-scan an extension, then, alright, I'll grant that they did to a virus scan, at least once. But it would be foolish to say, "So that's why it's not really a Mozilla problem, because the software program couldn't detect it." It would be akin to that time when some reporters tested Homeland Security by illegally but successfully mailing a package of uranium into the US, and Homeland Security said, "Yeah, well, the reason it slipped by our security was only because they didn't mark on the package that there was uranium inside."
I'm sure that Firefox has quite a bit of QA done to it... but it's usefulness relies too much on extensions, which we don't that many assurances about.
The untrustworthiness of extensions has long been a concern of mine, and in a way I'm actually glad that this trojan, which affects a relatively small segment of the Firefox user community, came to be. I hope it's a warning call to Firefox users and especially to the Mozilla foundation, which actually said in a Slashdot interview, "Oh, we don't see a lot of demand for including default extensions into Firefox which are more rigourously checked."
I think Mozilla should:
- include a SMALL number of useful extensions with the default installation of Firefox. That number should be countable on one hand. (My vote: Adblock Plus, Noscript, Tab Mix Plus)
- be responsible for checking these extensions. They don't have to write the programs, but someone should go over the source and scan for viruses etc.
- set up some mechanism on the Add-ons web site whereby extensions can develop a reputation. For example, an extension that has been around for a long time and has gone through quite a few version changes is unlikely to have a trojan. Users should be able to see how long the extension has been around. If someone new is taking charge of maintaining the extension, this should be shown, too, in case someone is trying to weasel his way into taking over a longstanding extension for nefarious purposes.
(This is NOT to say that the SMALL number of extensions should become a built-in part of Firefox. D'you hear that, Mozilla? We want a LEANER Firefox. I love Adblock Plus, Noscript and Tab Mix Plus, but I do NOT want them to be built-in.)
Much as the existence of a Firefox extension trojan is appalling news, I think this is part of the maturation process of the F/LOSS community. I liken this to the proliferation of the Internet in its early days when people were first starting to find out that Unix needed to have built-in security measures, and sysadmins needed to be on the lookout for malicious users. In the same way, the set of computer users savvy enough to use Firefox now need to start learning that there can be malicious hackers of Firefox, too, and that it now affects more people than just the conglomeration of closeted basement geeks.
C'mon Mozilla. You can do it. Doesn't take that much effort; the main thing to do is to spread awareness of security issues, and stop being so naive about extensions.
Our medical group has created a number of short video clips for educating our patients on various relevant health and health care topics, and is posting them on YouTube. We figure it's an easy way to disseminate knowledge to the general population.
So, yes, I agree with you that you can't label all of YouTube as bad.
Maybe a better test would be to have someone who is not familiar with Windows to test it. That way they do not have to unlearn the windows way.
That would only tell you how well it works for someone who is not familiar with Windows. Since the majority of computer users have used Windows before, then it would be more useful to cater to them. Of course, what we should aim for is catering to all computer users, whether Windows-based or not; but it would be silly to ignore the Windows users just because they need to "unlearn the Windows way".
I would like to see them do the same thing with a non pre-configurated windows (no flash, no video or sound driver etc.) without any software that's not "out of the box". Oh - and it must read files from a Ubuntu partition to be able to burn music (let her figure out how to do this)...
That would make the comparison a bit more fair don't you think?
Yes, that would make your comparison a bit more fair. But who cares? We just want to improve the usability. We just want lay people to be able to use a computer like a tool, a means to get something done, rather than an object/end in itself. It's irrelevant whether MS Windows can handle Linux the same way Linux can handle Windows. Can you imagine if Apple said, "Okay, we are now just as good as Windows --no need to improve usability"?
In the end, users don't care about petty rivalries between Windows and Linux. They just want to get the job done. This insightful article will hopefully point out how we can improve.
Please excuse me for sneaking in this OT question: While we're talking about GRUB and MBR, I wanted to check if I understood how GRUB really worked.
Apparently GRUB writes itself to the MBR, and then everything else is configurable without any further change to the MBR.
This means that changes to the boot config have to be stored somewhere else, not on the MBR. Where is it stored?
I *think* it's stored on one of the (logical) drives, but wouldn't this be a major design flaw? Suppose I have a hard drive, with its MBR, and I have Ubuntu in partition 1, and Red Hat in partition 2. I install dual-boot with GRUB, running the command from Ubuntu. After a while, I find myself always using Red Hat and never Ubuntu. After a year or two, I decide to clean out the Ubuntu drive to make room for a data drive, or I install some other OS, or I expand the Red Hat drive and obliterate the Ubuntu drive.
So, suddenly, I can't boot, right? Even though I've been using Red Hat every time, the boot process requires that the Ubuntu partition be present or else GRUB has no idea how to boot up the computer.
Is that correct? Or is there some other secret partition where GRUB stashes its data? Or is it not in a partition at all?
Any insight and explanation would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Kittenauth comes pre-cracked. You see, any time a computer has a 10% success rate for a CAPTCHA, it is considered cracked.
Not sure what your point is. When you say "pre-cracked", you seem to be claiming that a computer has a 10% success rate beforehand. Not sure why that is; is there an algorithm you are aware of that lets the computer recognize the kitten? As far as I know, the computer would be choosing randomly.
The only thing I can think of is that you may have misunderstood the test to be "choose the 1 kitten from the 9" (which would, of course, have a 11.1% chance of success). The chance of randomly choosing 3 kittens from the 9 would be 1 in 84.
Even 1 in 84 is not that great, but kittenauth is only a general concept. To minimize the chance of random success even more, choose 4 kittens from the 9, a 1 in 126 chance. (Choosing 5 or more kittens than that would not help minimize the chances.) Or you could increase the choices to 3 kittens from 10 animals (1 in 120 chance). Or you could separate the choices into: choose 2 cute kittens and 1 fierce kitten, in that order.
I can see that you'd need to have a large library of images of kittens, though.
I rather like the 3-D randomly generated diagram of a sitting stick figure and a standing one, and naming what body parts are closest to the vase, or tabletop, or something like that. Can't remember the keywords to do a Google, but it was featured on a Slashdot article once.
I registered with MyDomain. US$9/yr per domain name. They seem okay. We've added subdomain names and modified various email forwarding settings using web forms, and generally it has taken effect within an hour (usually within half an hour). No big problems. Haven't tried to switch to different registrars yet, though, so I don't know how they are in that respect. I checked out their web site before going with them, and I liked how they responded to messages in their help forum.
Slightly offtopic: the above was for domain registration. What about hosting? My previous hosting service, a volunteer-based hosting service, got shut down due to lack of donations. I'm looking for a place that can let me host a web site with structured directories (places like GooglePages does not allow subdirectories) and hopefully CGI (Python preferred, Perl if need be). Having 100MB would be nice, but I really only need about 20MB. If I have choices not within the USA, I'll try those because of the increasingly draconian USA government attitude toward what they can do with my data.
Any recommendations? I've heard of Rackspace in the UK, but haven't checked them out yet.
I see you've been modded flamebait. Good for the mods.
As an experiment I wiped a spare machine of Windows 2000 (which my 10 year old daughter was so fond of) and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 on it. After 1 month of struggling with learning the machine, she won't even touch that computer.
Well, you probably biased her against it then. A lot of my relatives are using Ubuntu, they love it, and they are not having any problems with it.
What a self-centred, egotistical and rude statement to make. The GP poster gives a case example where a 10-year-old child familiar with Windows didn't adapt to Ubuntu. You're saying that this is the fault of the GP poster. As evidence, you state that you know some people who, unlike the GP's daughter, do enjoy using Ubuntu. It reminds me of a joke about how Microsoft supports its software:
Q: How many Microsoft phone support people does it take to change a Microsoft Lightbulb for Windows(tm)?
A: Why, what's wrong with your lightbulb? I have the exact same copy of your lightbulb right here, and it works fine.
It boggles the imagination how you could possibly think that because you know some people who like Ubuntu, there must be something wrong if there exists someone else who doesn't like Ubuntu. Did you ask what sorts of applications GP's daughter uses? What programs she had been used to on Win2000? Why she didn't like Ubuntu? Whether she often used other machines (e.g. at school)?
And while I'll tough it out (to my extreme dismay) and learn Linux and other free systems, truthfully, I just don't like them
You know, nobody gives a damn what you use or don't use. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Actually, people do give a very big damn about people like the GP and his daughter, since they are the ones that will determine the place of desktop Linux in mainstream computing, and how much hardware manufacturers will pay attention to the demand for Linux-compatible drivers.
Not to mention that the extra effort you put into being sarcastic in your post would have been better used for generating about 3 ergs of non-fossil-fuel-based energy. Yes, I know you're trolling, and that right now you're masturbating to the fact that someone's actually answering you. I just want to make sure people like the GP and others know that it is indeed useful for the Linux community to know about their experiences with Linux and what can be done to make them better. Hope your account (isn't a nick like "nguy" tantamount to saying "I'm a sock puppet"?) gets downmodded to hell.
but I wouldn't define it as an achievement of human progress.
It's evidence of the exact opposite: a lack of progress.
Oh, I'd say that's progress alright. Progress for Linux. Microsoft is aggressively marketing Vista so it replaces XP, and all of a sudden they decide to make XP available for very low-end PC's? The PC's with the same computing power as the desktops of yesteryear, that had previously been derided as "oh, that computer's not good enough to run a real advanced operating system like Vista"? Well, gee, that wouldn't happen to be the sound of Microsoft running scared, would it?
To be sure, MS probably doesn't have anything to worry about... yet. But, bit by bit, they're showing chinks in the armour. They're reacting after the fact to new markets like the Asus EEE: "Huh? Why would anyone use that? It doesn't run Vista!" They're trying to conceal their slow-moving corporate thought process: "Huh? We need an Internet portal? I guess we suck at doing that. Let's go buy another big company like Yahoo! instead." They're telling the world, "We're so incompetent, even after 5 years we can't come out with an operating system that's better than our last one."
That's MS Arrogance(tm) for you. They showed it when they first set the extension of their MS Word documents to *.doc (rather than name it after their actual program, like *.wpr for WordPerfect), and they will ride it all the way into their grave of irrelevance.
Arrange two pens to touch at the tips, forming an acute angle between them (say, 30 degrees). Insert the third pen to nestle into the angle, touching both of the other pens. Now these three pens form a sort of arrow-shaped formation and are almost parallel (within, say, 30 degrees).
Arrange the fourth, fifth, and sixth pens the same way, and lay them on top of the first three pens in an orthogonal direction, so that the "arrow" formed by the 4th, 5th, and 6th pens is perpendicular to that formed by the first three pens.
Hi, Mr. Coward. Boy, you post a lot of comments. Some are insightful. This particular one was not.
What you're looking for is apt-cache search [terms].
In that case, in order for the command line to be the equal of the "guided" interface, the error message should suggest this. Something like: "apt-get: error- no such package. Use apt-cache search [package] to look for a package."
If you would take two seconds and ask instead of throwing your hands up and saying "oh noes! too many commands" we would've told you.
It's okay, I'm perfectly capable of finding these commands. But when you ask me to take "two seconds", you're not really being honest with yourself, are you? Sure, it takes only two minutes to log in to a forum and post, or maybe navigate to IRC if that's available. But it takes a lot longer than that to get an answer that you can use to solve your problem. Sometimes you get lucky with a quick and comprehensible answer, sometimes you don't. Compare that with the GUI or menu, which guides you so that you instantly know. What a big difference between the two, especially for the newbie!
There are only about a dozen CLI commands that most people need to be familiar with (and then you just reference the man page for syntax on the others).
So, the newbie has to memorize a dozen commands, and even then s/he'll still need to check the instructions for more commands? And you're saying that you don't see how this is harder for a newbie than using a GUI where you don't need to memorize anything? Boy, no wonder they say geeks don't know how to interact with the general population!
Or is it impossible now for someone to do what was commonplace just a little over ten years ago?
Again, you're bending the truth here. A little over ten years years ago, 95% of those 100,000 geeks knew how to use the command line. Now, only 5% of those 100,000,000 general computer users know how to use the command line. It wasn't quite as "commonplace", as you put it, ten years ago.
I imagine that the waiter at the Thai restaurant might have the same rebuttal for you: "What you are looking for is [insert colour here] Curry with Rice. If you would take two seconds to read the Thai Cuisine journals instead of throwing your hands up and saying, 'oh noes! i have no idea what Thai foods exist,' you would have found out. There are only about a dozen Thai words that most people need to know, like 'Tom' means 'soup', and then you can ask what Thai meats and spices make up the dish. Or is it impossible here for someone to do what 63 million people do in Thailand? (That would be getting Thai food without a menu?)"
Just make up your fucking minds already, every other week coffee is bad, then good, then bad again.
Reminds me of that article in The Onion that basically said: "Eggs don't cause cancer... this week. So eat some now before they're found to cause cancer next week!"
I honestly don't see how "apt-get install program" is... complex in any way.
A few years ago, I would have found your statement hard to believe; I would have labeled you as some sort of troll, deliberately provoking a response. More recently, I have come to learn that some people, like you, have a great deal of difficulty seeing things from the newbie point of view. This is not meant to be disrespectful, but at the same time I'm going to use you as an example to point out a flaw in many geeks, of which they are themselves unaware.
The problem with using the command line is NOT fear of the text-based interface.
Imagine for a moment that you have just been seated at a restaurant serving ethnic food that is new to you --say, for example, that your new girlfriend (who's dying to learn Linux from you) wants to try out that new Thai restaurant with you (replace "Thai" with any type of cuisine with which you are not familiar).
The waiter comes up to you and, instead of handing you a menu, says, "So, what do you want?" "Well, what do you have?" you ask. He shrugs. "Anything," he says. "What do you mean, 'anything'?" "It means exactly what I said," he answers. "You can order anything you want. We cook hundreds of different dishes, any way you like." "Okay, I'll have a steak." "That's not a Thai dish." "But you said *anything*." "But this is a Thai restaurant. When I said 'anything', I meant anything *Thai*, of course." "Okay, I'll have a typical Thai entree dish." "No such thing as 'Thai entree dish'. You have to tell me which Thai entree dish." "Well I have no idea." "Well, order anything. Anything *Thai*," he adds pointedly. "Such as?" The waiter becomes exasperated. "Well, you can have Pad See Ew, or Tom Yum Gong, or--" At this point, your girlfriend wisely cuts in and says, "Could we have a menu?" The waiter rolls his eyes. "All these newbies wanting to order from a menu! I honestly don't see how 'Tom Kha Khai' is master chef like or complex in any way. Our clients who consider 'Tom' confusing are the ones that will blank-face any illustrated menu for any type of food. For these people, we have the choice of two preset menus."
The point, I'm sure you'll have seen, is that when the command line asks the newbie, "Okay, what do you want to do now?" the newbie has absolutely no idea. There are too many possibilities. Sometimes the newbie will gamely try a command like "check my email" or "email", but the stony response of "bash: email: command not found" quickly puts him in his place. Hell, even *I* forget the ins and outs of some commands with their options (is it "find [directory] [target]" or "find [target] [directory]"?).
A common mistake, of which I will make yours an example (but you're certainly not alone in this), is that you think the newbie fears text mode. Now you see the difference? With apt-get, you could type any sequence of characters for a package name and there would be nothing to stop you except some cryptic message, "No such package as 'Thai entree dish'." The GUI, or text-based menu, limits your options so that it guides you to what you want. You can select packages. It doesn't matter whether the interface is graphical, ncurses, or just "Press 1, 2 or 3". Of course, newbies are more likely to warm up to the GUI, but that's secondary.
Now, I realize that you did say Synaptic would fill the void, but that doesn't necessarily help guide the newbie onto the command line.
I would love to have a tool that showed a menu of choices, either in a GUI or a ncurses text interface, that let me choose common commands, like that confusing "find" command I mentioned earlier. On the "find" window would be a form with a space to fill in "Enter directories to search" and "What filename are you looking for?" with perhaps some radio buttons or checkboxes for various command-line parameters. When you click OK, not only does it execute the command, it also tell
Slashdot Mirror
I love to do that, too! I've noticed, though, that nowadays a lot of companies have individually printed business reply mail that contains a serial number that probably maps to my name and address (how did they know that my parents, Mr. & Mrs. Resident, named me Current?). If I send it back, they'll know exactly who did it. Technically, that should tell them to stop sending to me since they're just wasting their time, but it proves that I'm reading their ads (rather than just dumping the junk mail), and I would much rather they get the feedback that "the generic recipient" is pissed off at their mass mailing, rather than any one particular person.
(On a side note: yes, I did try once specifically respond to a charity organization to take me off their list. I said that I would no longer contribute (I had contributed once) and could they please save my sanity --as well as their costs-- by taking me off the list. I kept getting more and more physical junk mail, almost as if they were being encouraged by my entreaties to stop. I threatened to diss them for wasting their income from donations, and I am making good on that threat with this post.)
Agree. I couldn't help thinking of the following xkcd comic, but note that this is the wrong way to go about things:
http://xkcd.com/386/
You are right. This is a great step forward. However, I think the Slashdot community, with its cynical eye on Microsoft, is reminding us to take this in the proper context. It remains to be seen whether this is the beginning of a slow but steady change of course for the world's largest software company, or whether this is a fake-out to fool people into thinking that Microsoft is nice.
Personally, I suspect that this reflects internal conflict within Microsoft, with some portions of the behemoth trying to do something good, while another faction still trying to squeeze money out of Microsoft's unique position in the software world.
In any case, remember how some people would say, "You always complain about Microsoft! What would it take for you to admit that Microsoft is doing something good?"
#2 on the list was: Stop hijacking the HTML standard and make a compliant browser! Then they put out IE7. (Not perfect, but a heckuva lot better than IE6!)
#1 on the list was: Open up the Word document file format. Okay, so they've done that. (Again, not perfect, but a heckuva lot better than what went on before!)
Congrats, Microsoft. You did it. A little late in coming, and you really didn't impress us with your OOXML fiasco waving that money around, but I'm willing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude to see whether it's still those same money-grubbing upper level managers that are in control, or whether this really is a new day at Microsoft.
I've had no problems with MyDomain.com. Yearly renewal at $9/yr. This includes email redirection; you can specify that various email addresses get redirected to different addresses, and a "none of the above" wildcard email address goes to yet another address you specify. It's great having disposable email addresses. (Unfortunately, doesn't do wildcard matching.)
Web sites get directed to their web server which consists of a single frame filling the page, and the contents of the frame are whichever web site you want to redirect it to. (You can also get it to actually point to another web site, but I haven't tried this so I can't say anything about it.)
I signed up with them because I was impressed by the technical support forums, which are open to non-customers. This was a few years ago; hope they're still just as good.
GP said:
and you said
You are both right. However, GP is more correct than you.
You speak of a distribution where the expected value is the correct solution, but you also said that it was a "symmetric" distribution (and thus it would be "centered" around the correct solution). This is sufficient but not necessary. Amazingly enough, no matter how asymmetric, skewed or weird-looking a distribution is, if you take the average of enough independent guesses, the distribution turns into a Gaussian bell curve.
For example, if you have a fair die, with faces numbered 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, and 7, then most of the time you will roll a 1, but once in a while you will roll a 7. The average value rolled is 2. If you roll the die, say, 4 times, the average will be 2 --with a somewhat bell-shaped curve. If you roll the die 20 times, it will be pretty much bell-shaped (and symmetric). If you roll it 100 times, it's a near-perfect bell.
Take a look at the Central Limit Theorem for more info. When I first learned this in stochastics, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Math can be stunningly beautiful sometimes.
"P0N.1E5" is a short way of saying "P0N100000".
For the words to appear, the material separating the magnets from the iron filings would have to be unaffected by magnets; for example, if you put the magnets under a sheet of plastic or wood, then the iron filings will clump according to the placement of the magnets. On the other hand, if the fender is made of plastic, the magnets won't stick to it in the first place.
That's just my intuition; can anyone correct me on this?
I have mod points but want to respond because others have been giving flippant responses.
"Funny" is an upmod that doesn't affect karma, so my guess is someone thought your post interesting to read but did not want to reward your user acct, just your post.
Similarly, posts that are so wittily funny that the poster deserves a reward are sometimes upmodded "+1 Informative" or some such, since "+1 Funny" doesn't reward the poster.
Sorry to hear about your troubles. Be careful of baring your soul and seeking sympathy from a faceless geek-agglomerate like Slashdot. If you want a bar-like atmosphere, IRC might be a better choice.
If you are asking whether Mozilla failed to virus-scan an extension, then, alright, I'll grant that they did to a virus scan, at least once.
But it would be foolish to say, "So that's why it's not really a Mozilla problem, because the software program couldn't detect it." It would be akin to that time when some reporters tested Homeland Security by illegally but successfully mailing a package of uranium into the US, and Homeland Security said, "Yeah, well, the reason it slipped by our security was only because they didn't mark on the package that there was uranium inside."
Reality sucks, but it needs to be faced.
I think Mozilla should:
- - include a SMALL number of useful extensions with the default installation of Firefox. That number should be countable on one hand. (My vote: Adblock Plus, Noscript, Tab Mix Plus)
- - be responsible for checking these extensions. They don't have to write the programs, but someone should go over the source and scan for viruses etc.
- - set up some mechanism on the Add-ons web site whereby extensions can develop a reputation. For example, an extension that has been around for a long time and has gone through quite a few version changes is unlikely to have a trojan. Users should be able to see how long the extension has been around. If someone new is taking charge of maintaining the extension, this should be shown, too, in case someone is trying to weasel his way into taking over a longstanding extension for nefarious purposes.
(This is NOT to say that the SMALL number of extensions should become a built-in part of Firefox. D'you hear that, Mozilla? We want a LEANER Firefox. I love Adblock Plus, Noscript and Tab Mix Plus, but I do NOT want them to be built-in.)Much as the existence of a Firefox extension trojan is appalling news, I think this is part of the maturation process of the F/LOSS community. I liken this to the proliferation of the Internet in its early days when people were first starting to find out that Unix needed to have built-in security measures, and sysadmins needed to be on the lookout for malicious users. In the same way, the set of computer users savvy enough to use Firefox now need to start learning that there can be malicious hackers of Firefox, too, and that it now affects more people than just the conglomeration of closeted basement geeks.
C'mon Mozilla. You can do it. Doesn't take that much effort; the main thing to do is to spread awareness of security issues, and stop being so naive about extensions.
If I recall: byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte.
Unless we're talking about the British "billion"?
Our medical group has created a number of short video clips for educating our patients on various relevant health and health care topics, and is posting them on YouTube. We figure it's an easy way to disseminate knowledge to the general population.
So, yes, I agree with you that you can't label all of YouTube as bad.
Yes, that would make your comparison a bit more fair. But who cares? We just want to improve the usability. We just want lay people to be able to use a computer like a tool, a means to get something done, rather than an object/end in itself. It's irrelevant whether MS Windows can handle Linux the same way Linux can handle Windows. Can you imagine if Apple said, "Okay, we are now just as good as Windows --no need to improve usability"?
In the end, users don't care about petty rivalries between Windows and Linux. They just want to get the job done. This insightful article will hopefully point out how we can improve.
Please excuse me for sneaking in this OT question: While we're talking about GRUB and MBR, I wanted to check if I understood how GRUB really worked.
Apparently GRUB writes itself to the MBR, and then everything else is configurable without any further change to the MBR.
This means that changes to the boot config have to be stored somewhere else, not on the MBR. Where is it stored?
I *think* it's stored on one of the (logical) drives, but wouldn't this be a major design flaw? Suppose I have a hard drive, with its MBR, and I have Ubuntu in partition 1, and Red Hat in partition 2. I install dual-boot with GRUB, running the command from Ubuntu. After a while, I find myself always using Red Hat and never Ubuntu. After a year or two, I decide to clean out the Ubuntu drive to make room for a data drive, or I install some other OS, or I expand the Red Hat drive and obliterate the Ubuntu drive.
So, suddenly, I can't boot, right? Even though I've been using Red Hat every time, the boot process requires that the Ubuntu partition be present or else GRUB has no idea how to boot up the computer.
Is that correct? Or is there some other secret partition where GRUB stashes its data? Or is it not in a partition at all?
Any insight and explanation would be much appreciated. Thank you.
The only thing I can think of is that you may have misunderstood the test to be "choose the 1 kitten from the 9" (which would, of course, have a 11.1% chance of success). The chance of randomly choosing 3 kittens from the 9 would be 1 in 84.
Even 1 in 84 is not that great, but kittenauth is only a general concept. To minimize the chance of random success even more, choose 4 kittens from the 9, a 1 in 126 chance. (Choosing 5 or more kittens than that would not help minimize the chances.) Or you could increase the choices to 3 kittens from 10 animals (1 in 120 chance). Or you could separate the choices into: choose 2 cute kittens and 1 fierce kitten, in that order.
I can see that you'd need to have a large library of images of kittens, though.
I rather like the 3-D randomly generated diagram of a sitting stick figure and a standing one, and naming what body parts are closest to the vase, or tabletop, or something like that. Can't remember the keywords to do a Google, but it was featured on a Slashdot article once.
(with apologies to Dr. Evil)
I registered with MyDomain. US$9/yr per domain name. They seem okay. We've added subdomain names and modified various email forwarding settings using web forms, and generally it has taken effect within an hour (usually within half an hour). No big problems. Haven't tried to switch to different registrars yet, though, so I don't know how they are in that respect. I checked out their web site before going with them, and I liked how they responded to messages in their help forum.
Slightly offtopic: the above was for domain registration. What about hosting? My previous hosting service, a volunteer-based hosting service, got shut down due to lack of donations. I'm looking for a place that can let me host a web site with structured directories (places like GooglePages does not allow subdirectories) and hopefully CGI (Python preferred, Perl if need be). Having 100MB would be nice, but I really only need about 20MB. If I have choices not within the USA, I'll try those because of the increasingly draconian USA government attitude toward what they can do with my data.
Any recommendations? I've heard of Rackspace in the UK, but haven't checked them out yet.
Q: How many Microsoft phone support people does it take to change a Microsoft Lightbulb for Windows(tm)?
A: Why, what's wrong with your lightbulb? I have the exact same copy of your lightbulb right here, and it works fine.
It boggles the imagination how you could possibly think that because you know some people who like Ubuntu, there must be something wrong if there exists someone else who doesn't like Ubuntu. Did you ask what sorts of applications GP's daughter uses? What programs she had been used to on Win2000? Why she didn't like Ubuntu? Whether she often used other machines (e.g. at school)?Actually, people do give a very big damn about people like the GP and his daughter, since they are the ones that will determine the place of desktop Linux in mainstream computing, and how much hardware manufacturers will pay attention to the demand for Linux-compatible drivers.
Not to mention that the extra effort you put into being sarcastic in your post would have been better used for generating about 3 ergs of non-fossil-fuel-based energy. Yes, I know you're trolling, and that right now you're masturbating to the fact that someone's actually answering you. I just want to make sure people like the GP and others know that it is indeed useful for the Linux community to know about their experiences with Linux and what can be done to make them better. Hope your account (isn't a nick like "nguy" tantamount to saying "I'm a sock puppet"?) gets downmodded to hell.
To be sure, MS probably doesn't have anything to worry about
They're telling the world, "We're so incompetent, even after 5 years we can't come out with an operating system that's better than our last one."
That's MS Arrogance(tm) for you. They showed it when they first set the extension of their MS Word documents to *.doc (rather than name it after their actual program, like *.wpr for WordPerfect), and they will ride it all the way into their grave of irrelevance.
Arrange two pens to touch at the tips, forming an acute angle between them (say, 30 degrees). Insert the third pen to nestle into the angle, touching both of the other pens. Now these three pens form a sort of arrow-shaped formation and are almost parallel (within, say, 30 degrees).
Arrange the fourth, fifth, and sixth pens the same way, and lay them on top of the first three pens in an orthogonal direction, so that the "arrow" formed by the 4th, 5th, and 6th pens is perpendicular to that formed by the first three pens.
Then post on Slashdot in a smug manner.
I imagine that the waiter at the Thai restaurant might have the same rebuttal for you: "What you are looking for is [insert colour here] Curry with Rice. If you would take two seconds to read the Thai Cuisine journals instead of throwing your hands up and saying, 'oh noes! i have no idea what Thai foods exist,' you would have found out. There are only about a dozen Thai words that most people need to know, like 'Tom' means 'soup', and then you can ask what Thai meats and spices make up the dish. Or is it impossible here for someone to do what 63 million people do in Thailand? (That would be getting Thai food without a menu?)"
A few years ago, I would have found your statement hard to believe; I would have labeled you as some sort of troll, deliberately provoking a response. More recently, I have come to learn that some people, like you, have a great deal of difficulty seeing things from the newbie point of view. This is not meant to be disrespectful, but at the same time I'm going to use you as an example to point out a flaw in many geeks, of which they are themselves unaware.
The problem with using the command line is NOT fear of the text-based interface.
Imagine for a moment that you have just been seated at a restaurant serving ethnic food that is new to you --say, for example, that your new girlfriend (who's dying to learn Linux from you) wants to try out that new Thai restaurant with you (replace "Thai" with any type of cuisine with which you are not familiar).
The waiter comes up to you and, instead of handing you a menu, says, "So, what do you want?"
"Well, what do you have?" you ask.
He shrugs. "Anything," he says.
"What do you mean, 'anything'?"
"It means exactly what I said," he answers. "You can order anything you want. We cook hundreds of different dishes, any way you like."
"Okay, I'll have a steak."
"That's not a Thai dish."
"But you said *anything*."
"But this is a Thai restaurant. When I said 'anything', I meant anything *Thai*, of course."
"Okay, I'll have a typical Thai entree dish."
"No such thing as 'Thai entree dish'. You have to tell me which Thai entree dish."
"Well I have no idea."
"Well, order anything. Anything *Thai*," he adds pointedly.
"Such as?"
The waiter becomes exasperated. "Well, you can have Pad See Ew, or Tom Yum Gong, or--"
At this point, your girlfriend wisely cuts in and says, "Could we have a menu?"
The waiter rolls his eyes. "All these newbies wanting to order from a menu! I honestly don't see how 'Tom Kha Khai' is master chef like or complex in any way. Our clients who consider 'Tom' confusing are the ones that will blank-face any illustrated menu for any type of food. For these people, we have the choice of two preset menus."
The point, I'm sure you'll have seen, is that when the command line asks the newbie, "Okay, what do you want to do now?" the newbie has absolutely no idea. There are too many possibilities. Sometimes the newbie will gamely try a command like "check my email" or "email", but the stony response of "bash: email: command not found" quickly puts him in his place. Hell, even *I* forget the ins and outs of some commands with their options (is it "find [directory] [target]" or "find [target] [directory]"?).
A common mistake, of which I will make yours an example (but you're certainly not alone in this), is that you think the newbie fears text mode. Now you see the difference? With apt-get, you could type any sequence of characters for a package name and there would be nothing to stop you except some cryptic message, "No such package as 'Thai entree dish'." The GUI, or text-based menu, limits your options so that it guides you to what you want. You can select packages. It doesn't matter whether the interface is graphical, ncurses, or just "Press 1, 2 or 3". Of course, newbies are more likely to warm up to the GUI, but that's secondary.
Now, I realize that you did say Synaptic would fill the void, but that doesn't necessarily help guide the newbie onto the command line.
I would love to have a tool that showed a menu of choices, either in a GUI or a ncurses text interface, that let me choose common commands, like that confusing "find" command I mentioned earlier. On the "find" window would be a form with a space to fill in "Enter directories to search" and "What filename are you looking for?" with perhaps some radio buttons or checkboxes for various command-line parameters. When you click OK, not only does it execute the command, it also tell