This is BBC World, the commercial arm of the BBC, and is not governed by the charter. They buy BBC content from the public part of the BBC at "market rates" and try to make money out of it by selling it abroad. The deal they've done here is unproblematic as far as the BBC is concerned, it's just the same as selling dubbed Teletubbies episodes to Mexico or whatever.
Providing free content in the UK is part of the public part of the BBC, which tends to move much, much slower due to the political difficulties. I expect it to happen eventually, but they won't rush into anything.
Please get a grip. Films have always been full of innacuracies. It's fiction for heaven's sake. Just because these fictions are in your area of expertise is no reason to get so wound up by it. If it bothers you so much, don't watch it.
The complete lack of "Elite" on these lists must be a conspiracy! I thought maybe they were all kids, but one of them at least names Lords of Midnight, which was pretty awesome. Nowhere near as good as elite though.
Last time I read the comments on a global warming story on slashdot, all the replies were from people in.us, basically claiming that global warming was a european plot to destabilise the US economy.
I even heard someone from the Bush administration on the radio claiming that this was pretty much a conspiracy by European goverments, who were able to do this because "European scientists are not independent - they are government funded".
This position was supported by quite a few US scientists who quite categorically denied global warming, or at least claimed it was natural.
So, now the evidence is pretty conclusive, what do all the gainsayers think? If our government funded scientists were in fact right, doesn't that make your corporate funded ones wrong? And why were they wrong? Are they perhaps, *shock* not independent? They are, after all, dependent on corporate dollars.
If you want similar functionality with some more capable tools, have a look at Twisted with Divmod's Nevow & Axiom. Similar functionality but with a a whole lot more to boot.
Since it doesn't really matter, surely we should just come up with a definition that leaves us with the existing 9 planets. Then we won't need to rewrite any books, or cause stupid arguments.
You may be right, but all this exposes is a failure in the educational system. The idea that there really is such a thing as a 'fact' and that you can teach them to people is the raison d'etre of much of education.
However, the existence of other encyclopedias won't stop kids using Wikipedia, and hopefully it will encourage them to doubt what they read and to dispute their teachers. This can only be a good thing:)
Seems like a perfect application for the Zope Object Database. It does all these things for you out of the box.
And you get to write it all in lovely lovely python. aaaah.
Well, (and this might sound dumb but it's absolutely true) my memory sucks. I mean really sucks. Someone asks me to do something, or anything really, and it's straight out of my memory instantly.
If it wasn't for my palm I'd just be constantly pissing people off. Especially my wife;)
And Microsoft will keep supporting it regardless. No matter how much they claim it's no longer supporting, if some worm is causing trouble, Microsoft will provide patches for 98.
The PR would be too bad otherwise, apart from anything else.
> Tying all this historical data back into longer > range forecasts would be fun. I've found TV > forecasting to be pretty stale and inaccurate. How > many of them have real meteorological degrees > anyway?
Well that would depend where you are. The BBC's weather forecasters are all real meteorologists, and prepare the forecast they deliver themselves.
Carr's comments are on the face of them obvious: with railways and electricity it's very true that as they became ubiquitous they became less valuable.
It's basic supply and demand. However he misses a critical point. Where the railways and the internet are basic infrastructural technologies, information technology is far wider. While all a railway can do is take you from A to B, IT can do - well almost anything.
A far better comparison would be internet bandwidth provision - that really is a commodity infrastructure, which was built with the same bubble mentality and is now ubiquitous and low-value.
But to comapare all of IT, from word processing to AI to controlling space probes to stuff that hasn't been invented yet, with such a basic technology a railways is just dumb.
I have to disagree with this. I've been using Zope and Plone for about six months now, and they have some of the most innovative stuff in them I have seen for a long time.
Seriously, go check them out. Once you're up to speed on Acquisition, ZODB Persistence, Zope Page Templates, Plone customisation and the rest of it, come back and tell me it's not innovative!
Well if you are in the US, you can be fired for anything. You can be proud your country has the lowest level of legal employment protection of any country in the world.
As it happens last week I got a machine with a Promise Fasttrak TX 2000 card in it. I wanted to mirror two disks.
Unfortunately, I discovered thatthe promise drivers are proprietary and that the drivers contain all the smarts - this is *SOFTWARE RAID*, just with a BIOS control screen to configure it.
I spent a couple of days trying to get this working on Debian - and I'm no linux slouch, but I was beat. In the end I got it to recognise the controller and used the kernel's standard disk mirroring - which some people claim gives better performance than the promise controllers anyhow.
Basically, these cards are pointless if you are a linux user. The only reason I can see to use them is if you want the same drives used as mirrors for both Windows and Linux on a dual-boot system. Otherwise, leave well alone.
Distributed clients like this one, as far as i am aware, just get parcelled out random blocks of the "possible key" space, and send back which numbers they checked, right? Is there any way to PROVE those numbers were, in fact, correctly checked, besides asking multiple clients to check each individual block and hoping that at least one of the clients tells the truth? Like, is there anything to prevent Microsoft from just randomly calling up the project with a bunch of dummy clients that submit the REAL x-box key a couple times to the "i've checked this and it's not the key" list?
Well, the server-side can decide who gets given each key, so microsoft would need a lot of clients to ensure they were asked to check the real key. If the software allowed any client to return results for any key, that would be a pretty obvious hole.
It would be standard practice to have everything checked at least twice anyway - even if only to ensure you are't bitten by a bug.
If they leave their workstations on overnight, you can back them up using amanda and samba - samba provides the smbtar functionality just for this purpose.
Of course, you'll need to spend some cash on a tape robot - and with the size of many peecee drives these days, you may need a big one.
It's a great thing to do, as long as you don't run any proprietary software.
We administer 3 different OSs here (Solaris, Debian and OpenBSD), and the additional learning, experience and perspective we get is really valuable.
When you have to consider that your code will run on multiple OSes it forces you to consider what you really want to do. You need to pay attention to where the pedal touches the metal, and this is always valuable. It stops you making arbitrary assumptions.
The only problem is proprietary software - this generally sucks anyway and the real evidence is portability.
Easy portability is a sign of good software - abstractions were made in the right places, and concern for multiple target environments was considered from day 1 (even on one OS you can get a lot of different configs).
You can't port most proprietary software yourself, since important bits you need to know about are kept sooper sekrit. Even if it isn't, it's often so crap it's not worth the effort.
I wouldn't believe many vendors claims of portability - the devil is in the detail, and unless you can get in there and fix the odd stupid assumption yourself, you are going to spend the rest of your life on the phone to clueless vendor support monkeys.
Sending a link in an email isn't as straightforward as you make out - it would require the recipients to have Unicode enabled mail readers for them to see the link as it really is.
At the moment, this is only really supported in HTML (and even then the support is patchy).
If you are going to send out HTML, there is no real need for that level of sophistication - a link like:
This is potentially more of a problem in the future for those who use large character sets regularly, and therefore support Unicode natively on their platform in things like MUAs.
Slashdot Mirror
This is BBC World, the commercial arm of the BBC, and is not governed by the charter. They buy BBC content from the public part of the BBC at "market rates" and try to make money out of it by selling it abroad. The deal they've done here is unproblematic as far as the BBC is concerned, it's just the same as selling dubbed Teletubbies episodes to Mexico or whatever.
Providing free content in the UK is part of the public part of the BBC, which tends to move much, much slower due to the political difficulties. I expect it to happen eventually, but they won't rush into anything.
Please get a grip. Films have always been full of innacuracies. It's fiction for heaven's sake. Just because these fictions are in your area of expertise is no reason to get so wound up by it. If it bothers you so much, don't watch it.
Elite, Tetris, Nethack, The Hobbit, World of Warcraft ;)
The complete lack of "Elite" on these lists must be a conspiracy! I thought maybe they were all kids, but one of them at least names Lords of Midnight, which was pretty awesome. Nowhere near as good as elite though.
Last time I read the comments on a global warming story on slashdot, all the replies were from people in .us, basically claiming that global warming was a european plot to destabilise the US economy.
I even heard someone from the Bush administration on the radio claiming that this was pretty much a conspiracy by European goverments, who were able to do this because "European scientists are not independent - they are government funded".
This position was supported by quite a few US scientists who quite categorically denied global warming, or at least claimed it was natural.
So, now the evidence is pretty conclusive, what do all the gainsayers think? If our government funded scientists were in fact right, doesn't that make your corporate funded ones wrong? And why were they wrong? Are they perhaps, *shock* not independent? They are, after all, dependent on corporate dollars.
If you want similar functionality with some more capable tools, have a look at Twisted with Divmod's Nevow & Axiom. Similar functionality but with a a whole lot more to boot.
Since it doesn't really matter, surely we should just come up with a definition that leaves us with the existing 9 planets. Then we won't need to rewrite any books, or cause stupid arguments.
You may be right, but all this exposes is a failure in the educational system. The idea that there really is such a thing as a 'fact' and that you can teach them to people is the raison d'etre of much of education.
:)
However, the existence of other encyclopedias won't stop kids using Wikipedia, and hopefully it will encourage them to doubt what they read and to dispute their teachers. This can only be a good thing
Seems like a perfect application for the Zope Object Database. It does all these things for you out of the box. And you get to write it all in lovely lovely python. aaaah.
Well, (and this might sound dumb but it's absolutely true) my memory sucks. I mean really sucks. Someone asks me to do something, or anything really, and it's straight out of my memory instantly.
;)
If it wasn't for my palm I'd just be constantly pissing people off. Especially my wife
And Microsoft will keep supporting it regardless. No matter how much they claim it's no longer supporting, if some worm is causing trouble, Microsoft will provide patches for 98.
The PR would be too bad otherwise, apart from anything else.
> Tying all this historical data back into longer
:)
> range forecasts would be fun. I've found TV
> forecasting to be pretty stale and inaccurate. How
> many of them have real meteorological degrees
> anyway?
Well that would depend where you are. The BBC's weather forecasters are all real meteorologists, and prepare the forecast they deliver themselves.
Hurrah for auntie
Carr's comments are on the face of them obvious: with railways and electricity it's very true that as they became ubiquitous they became less valuable.
It's basic supply and demand. However he misses a critical point. Where the railways and the internet are basic infrastructural technologies, information technology is far wider. While all a railway can do is take you from A to B, IT can do - well almost anything.
A far better comparison would be internet bandwidth provision - that really is a commodity infrastructure, which was built with the same bubble mentality and is now ubiquitous and low-value.
But to comapare all of IT, from word processing to AI to controlling space probes to stuff that hasn't been invented yet, with such a basic technology a railways is just dumb.
I have to disagree with this. I've been using Zope and Plone for about six months now, and they have some of the most innovative stuff in them I have seen for a long time.
Seriously, go check them out. Once you're up to speed on Acquisition, ZODB Persistence, Zope Page Templates, Plone customisation and the rest of it, come back and tell me it's not innovative!
Seriously, this technology owns.
There's been a lot of ranting about whether this is legal or not.
Well, it might be, depending on how it is presented. See my EULA FAQ for details.
You can't, basically.
Many of these devices are illegal in Europe under disability access laws, unless alternatives are provided that are accessible.
Well if you are in the US, you can be fired for anything. You can be proud your country has the lowest level of legal employment protection of any country in the world.
There are 78000 terrorists!? No wonder i've been blown up 12 times this morning!
As it happens last week I got a machine with a Promise Fasttrak TX 2000 card in it. I wanted to mirror two disks.
Unfortunately, I discovered thatthe promise drivers are proprietary and that the drivers contain all the smarts - this is *SOFTWARE RAID*, just with a BIOS control screen to configure it.
I spent a couple of days trying to get this working on Debian - and I'm no linux slouch, but I was beat. In the end I got it to recognise the controller and used the kernel's standard disk mirroring - which some people claim gives better performance than the promise controllers anyhow.
Basically, these cards are pointless if you are a linux user. The only reason I can see to use them is if you want the same drives used as mirrors for both Windows and Linux on a dual-boot system. Otherwise, leave well alone.
so what happens when ipv6 finally gets rolled out to everyone and we all have static addresses?
Distributed clients like this one, as far as i am aware, just get parcelled out random blocks of the "possible key" space, and send back which numbers they checked, right? Is there any way to PROVE those numbers were, in fact, correctly checked, besides asking multiple clients to check each individual block and hoping that at least one of the clients tells the truth? Like, is there anything to prevent Microsoft from just randomly calling up the project with a bunch of dummy clients that submit the REAL x-box key a couple times to the "i've checked this and it's not the key" list?
Well, the server-side can decide who gets given each key, so microsoft would need a lot of clients to ensure they were asked to check the real key. If the software allowed any client to return results for any key, that would be a pretty obvious hole.
It would be standard practice to have everything checked at least twice anyway - even if only to ensure you are't bitten by a bug.
If they leave their workstations on overnight, you can back them up using amanda and samba - samba provides the smbtar functionality just for this purpose.
Of course, you'll need to spend some cash on a tape robot - and with the size of many peecee drives these days, you may need a big one.
It's a great thing to do, as long as you don't run any proprietary software.
We administer 3 different OSs here (Solaris, Debian and OpenBSD), and the additional learning, experience and perspective we get is really valuable.
When you have to consider that your code will run on multiple OSes it forces you to consider what you really want to do. You need to pay attention to where the pedal touches the metal, and this is always valuable. It stops you making arbitrary assumptions.
The only problem is proprietary software - this generally sucks anyway and the real evidence is portability.
Easy portability is a sign of good software - abstractions were made in the right places, and concern for multiple target environments was considered from day 1 (even on one OS you can get a lot of different configs).
You can't port most proprietary software yourself, since important bits you need to know about are kept sooper sekrit. Even if it isn't, it's often so crap it's not worth the effort.
I wouldn't believe many vendors claims of portability - the devil is in the detail, and unless you can get in there and fix the odd stupid assumption yourself, you are going to spend the rest of your life on the phone to clueless vendor support monkeys.
Yeah right.
So these users are ripping the album off by *BURNING NEW COPIES OF IT ONTO CD*.
Doesn't that sound fishy to anyone?
Sending a link in an email isn't as straightforward as you make out - it would require the recipients to have Unicode enabled mail readers for them to see the link as it really is.
At the moment, this is only really supported in HTML (and even then the support is patchy).
If you are going to send out HTML, there is no real need for that level of sophistication - a link like:
http://www.microsoft.com
will fool enough people.
This is potentially more of a problem in the future for those who use large character sets regularly, and therefore support Unicode natively on their platform in things like MUAs.