Companies are already running call centres for the UK and Australia (and probably the US) out of India. They give their staff fake Western-style names, and give them voice coaching and "cultural awareness" training so that they can fool most people into believing that they actually speaking to local staff.
There seems to be some suggestion that that is exactly what SCO is trying to get IBM to do, so that SCO's owners can get out with some cash.
If IBM made a takeover offer now, the market would probably assume that they fear losing the lawsuit, and that would increase SCO's value way above its current market capitalization, to somewhere much closer to a billion dollars(maybe more-they could probably go after several other big Linux-supporting IT firms).
Given that the evidence behind the claim appears to be very, very shaky, and the stakes are high, it would seem to be worth IBM's while to fight this one out in the courts for a while. If they win, they can *then* purchase SCO's IP for a song, far less than even the 25 million of the current market cap:)
If the Labor government in UnZed talked to their fraternal comrades across the Tasman (currently in Opposition at the federal level), they'd find out that Labor here has figured out that trying to impose censorship is a waste of time. Letting parents install filters if they want to keeps everyone happy, except the wowsers who want to ban everything except Disney films. They all vote Conservative anyway, so why worry about keeping them happy?
Go on, laugh all you want. But that proposition was put strongly at a keynote on TCPA and Palladium I attended.
The speaker, a guy who I had not heard of before but had clearly been working on computer security for decades, argued that both Windows and Linux had fscked up security majorly by letting drivers run in ring 0 and thus giving them access to everything in the kernel (for instance, letting your video driver quietly monitor your network traffic). His argument was that the x86 had the facility to run drivers in ring 1, thus quarantining them from touching hardware they weren't supposed to.
I don't understand the internals of the x86 well enough to know how much actual security that would add, and I would also argue that I would much prefer an open source driver running with unlimited privileges to a closed-source driver in a sandbox.
The other issue is that shifting drivers out of ring 0 might affect performance quite a lot, and if there's no real gain in security (or stability, because it would also be some protection against a badly-written driver screwing the whole system), it's probably not worth the bother.
The Anti-American feelings across the Atlantic are going to bite you in the ass, not only through this but because you refused to sign up to things like Kyoto and the ICC.
Europe isn't going to give a shit when America wants Europe to open up its agricultural markets in the next WTO round. That'll cost US farmers plenty. For example.
Not only have we had really lame television advertisements about the increased threat of terrorism telling us to be "alert, but not alarmed" and very little else of use, the government has sent out an "information brochure" with a cover letter from the Prime Minister, containing information on what to do in case of a terrorist attack and fridge magnet listing handy numbers to call in case of seeing "suspicious activity" to every friggin' household in Australia, at the cost of 20-odd million dollars (the rough equivalent of a 200-million dollar spend in the US federal budget).
The brochures contain absolutely nothing useful, it's just the standard natural-disaster guff. The general reaction has been that it's a gross waste of money and an exercise in scaring people into sticking with the incumbent government.In fact, many thousands of people, myself included, have written "return to sender" on the wrapper and dropped it back in the post...:)
The library I was using was called
Svlis, which is GPL'd and runs under Linux. You'll have to hack the code a little bit to get it to run with the latest C++ standard libraries - when I get some time I intend to do a cleanup and send the developer a patch.
I can't disclose the details of the "benchmark" I was doing because it pertains directly to some as-yet unpublished research. Sorry!
I've just been trying to squeeze some extra performance out of a 3D modelling library I've been playing with. This was on a PIII, and the library is written in C++.
Compared to -O2, I got about 10% overall improvement with -O3 -funroll-loops -march=pentium3 -ffast-math. The last one isn't one you should use generally, though.
The code used a great deal of double-precision floating point, so you could probably get an even greater speedup on a P4 by enabling SSE2.
That's exactly what a fuel cell does. You keep on topping up the tank, it keeps on producing power indefinitely. IIRC, you have to flush the fuel cell every so often to get rid of the contaminants that build up, but you can do that with the fuel itself, so that's no great drama.
However, this particular fuel cell system is probably designed for safety and ease of refilling, and would have a battery or ultracapacitor backup, so the cartridges are probably not refillable on the fly - you have to stop the system, swap the fuel cartridge, and start it up again.
In the future, though, it's not hard to see people taking fuel-cell "generators" on camping trips.
Even if the government proposes more restrictive laws, this more than likely won't get through the Senate.
Labor, the main opposition party, has already announced that they will block this. Neither the Democrats or Greens are likely to support it either. If so, it's dead in the water.
Not to mention the fact that there's a whole lot of Australians who like their net pr0n, and they won't be happy if the government actually implements something that stops them getting it.
Oh, and Alston is a complete fuckwad. I know a staffer for another minister, and even he thinks Alston is a dickhead and that his staff don't have a clue about their portfolio.
If the router is compromised, there's nothing stopping it sending out properly authenticated packets-of-doom.
I don't know what the complete solution to this is, but simple authentication isn't it. At a first line of defence, what about some sanity checking on the routing information provided?
No, I'm not bitter... part of that was our fault. But when enteprising young men from Nigeria (much like British "entrepreneurs" in the late 1800s and early 1900s) decide to fleece Britain or America, fooling the locals from those countries, I must admit it makes me chuckle just a little bit:-)
You may not be bitter, but from what little we hear about African politics and foriegn relationships I get the distinct impression that bitterness at whitey seems to be a fairly strong factor in at least some African countries' dealings with the west.
To give a pertinent example, the attitude of your country's government and that of the South African government towards Zimbabwe and the recent actions of its leadership, are very hard to explain.
As the situation is reported here, Mugabe is a violent thug who resorted to violence and fraud to win himself another term of government. His policy of taking land off white farmers and handing it over to black party cronies who have no idea how to farm the land is, as reported here, starving and improverishing his own people and bringing the economy of Zimbabwe to a complete halt.
Whilst I'm not familiar with the details, I do have a vague idea of how the farmers got hold of that land in the first place, how they live a lifestyle that most Africans could only dream about, and how they treated their employees in the past. However, sending the farms to lie fallow has led the country to economic ruin and the possibility of famine, forcibly seizing property without compensation (not to mention encouraging general lawlessness) is guaranteed to deter the foriegn investment which is an excellent way to improve living standards, and rather than helping the great majority of Zimbabweans these properties have been transferred from a few rich white people to a few rich friends of Mugabe.
Now, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK led the push to have Zimbabwe suspended from the Commonwealth. Yes, this is a largely symbolic slap on the wrist, but even that was fought tooth and nail by some of the African members of the Commonwealth. And now South Africa and Nigeria (along with Australia, a three-nation panel set up to monitor the situation in Zimbabwe) want to let Zimbabwe back in again!
It has been suggested in a couple of articles that part of the real reason that they want Zimbabwe readmitted is that at least there's a sneaking admiration for Mugabe for, well, sticking it up whitey, even if it is, aside from being brutal, disasterous for his country.
What's your take on the Zimbabwe sitation, and the reactions from other African governments? Am I being horribly racist? If there's another explanation for what's going on, what is it? Is the situation misreported in the West?
Oh, and, by the way, I do realise that Zimbabwe is a fair way away from Nigeria, but it's a hell of a lot closer to you than it is to me (I'm Australian).
It seems like every proposal I hear for a solution to the spam problem concludes with "If enough people did this, then...". That highlights the main problem with tarpits and similar mechanisms that only work when used en masse.
This doesn't require every user to do stuff. It doesn't even require every sysadmin to do stuff. It just requires a reasonable number of sysadmins to do stuff.
To build a planetary probe you need to be able to build/extract/refine...
Rad-hardened chips and rather advanced circuitry
Radioisotopes (so you need uranium, which to the best of my knowledge has not been found in minable quantities on the moon).
All manner of complex alloys, plastics, and probably carbon composites (so, you want glass as well).
Propellant for rockets. There might be useful quantities of water down at the south pole, but it's a real bitch to get (at -238 Celsius or so). Alternatively, you might build a space elevator or an rail gun launcher, but they're both massive engineering projects.
Then, you need one hell of a machine shop to make the parts to very high precision, assemble, and test them, all of which will require highly skilled technicians for the foreseeable future.
You need mining operations to extract all these things (if you have to ship them from earth, you may as well build the probe on Earth). Carbon is very rare on the moon, so you might well need an asteroid mining operation to get it...
Until the cost of getting off Earth gets much lower, the capital cost of launching all the equipment and personnel necessary to run the kind of moon base you're talking about is going to be so massive as to be beyond the discretionary resources of even the US government for a while.
You have a show where a badly dressed fat guy in his 40's exposes corporate fraud, corporate pollution, corporate bribes and general corporate stuffing of the masses:)
Though maybe "The awful truth", with, say, Christina Ricci and $(RANDOM_EX_BOY_BAND_MEMBER) would be an improvement...
I don't know how much of her current work is actually her writing. Nor do I know whether she will turn out to be some kind of musical genius. The point was that the musical zeitgeist has changed, and angst and rock are back in again.
Her original audience is getting a little older, probably finds Britney kind of embarrassing, and has moved on to somebody a bit more "real" like Avril Lavigne (of course, "The Matrix" songwriting group, previously responsible for Christina Aguilera, writes Avril's stuff, but that's by the by). Spears can't write her own stuff (George Michael, say), has a mediocre voice, is going to look less and less like jailbait as she gets older, and isn't nearly as adept at reinvention as, say, Madonna.
Still, even given the rapaciousness of her management and record company, Britney will have made enough money to live like a princess for the rest of her life, so at this point I wouldn't really be caring terribly much if I were her.
that they need a computer program to tell them what's likely to be a hit and what isn't?
Call me naive, but aren't they supposed to be experts in picking hit songs already, and if a computer program can do the job what the hell are they being paid to do?
The point is that what could Whedon and co be doing if they weren't writing yet another series of Buffy?
Eventually all the things that can be done within the confines of a series, get done, and the series gets stale, particularly on character-driven shows like Buffy. (Law and Order, for example, is easier to sustain because it doesn't depend so much on character, more issues which they often pretty much rip out of the newspaper). With Buffy, they have done well to sustain things by letting the characters grow up, introducing and killing off other characters, and so on, but, still, it would be much easier to write for a new series where there's still room to flesh out the characters and play with new relationships, and produce better results.
So don't just think of what you're gaining from the umpteenth series of your favourite show, think of what you're losing by having your favourite writers struggle to take the characters places we haven't already seen before.
Theo De Raadt made the following comment in the context of explaining why an externally-written packet filter needed to be removed from OpenBSD:
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including
modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
The Loebner contest, today, is like offering a prize for the first successful trip to the moon would have been in, say, 1900. Visionary, but hopelessly overambitious.
GNU maxima is a free symbolic algebra package, roughly equivalent to Mathematica. It's not nearly as tidy, but I've found it handy on occasion.
If you want to do some statistics, there's also R, a stats analysis package. It's very powerful, but it's designed for experts rather than non-statisticians who occasionally want to crunch some numbers.
Yes, it had a map to Earth displaying Earth's position relative to the nearest dozen or so pulsars.
No, it didn't play Bach. Voyager probes have a disc on them which features, amongst other things, excerpts of classical music (I assume there's some Bach on there), but not Pioneer.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies are already running call centres for the UK and Australia (and probably the US) out of India. They give their staff fake Western-style names, and give them voice coaching and "cultural awareness" training so that they can fool most people into believing that they actually speaking to local staff.
A 100% defence against voiceprint identification: use text messaging.
If IBM made a takeover offer now, the market would probably assume that they fear losing the lawsuit, and that would increase SCO's value way above its current market capitalization, to somewhere much closer to a billion dollars(maybe more-they could probably go after several other big Linux-supporting IT firms).
Given that the evidence behind the claim appears to be very, very shaky, and the stakes are high, it would seem to be worth IBM's while to fight this one out in the courts for a while. If they win, they can *then* purchase SCO's IP for a song, far less than even the 25 million of the current market cap :)
If the Labor government in UnZed talked to their fraternal comrades across the Tasman (currently in Opposition at the federal level), they'd find out that Labor here has figured out that trying to impose censorship is a waste of time. Letting parents install filters if they want to keeps everyone happy, except the wowsers who want to ban everything except Disney films. They all vote Conservative anyway, so why worry about keeping them happy?
The speaker, a guy who I had not heard of before but had clearly been working on computer security for decades, argued that both Windows and Linux had fscked up security majorly by letting drivers run in ring 0 and thus giving them access to everything in the kernel (for instance, letting your video driver quietly monitor your network traffic). His argument was that the x86 had the facility to run drivers in ring 1, thus quarantining them from touching hardware they weren't supposed to.
I don't understand the internals of the x86 well enough to know how much actual security that would add, and I would also argue that I would much prefer an open source driver running with unlimited privileges to a closed-source driver in a sandbox.
The other issue is that shifting drivers out of ring 0 might affect performance quite a lot, and if there's no real gain in security (or stability, because it would also be some protection against a badly-written driver screwing the whole system), it's probably not worth the bother.
Europe isn't going to give a shit when America wants Europe to open up its agricultural markets in the next WTO round. That'll cost US farmers plenty. For example.
The brochures contain absolutely nothing useful, it's just the standard natural-disaster guff. The general reaction has been that it's a gross waste of money and an exercise in scaring people into sticking with the incumbent government.In fact, many thousands of people, myself included, have written "return to sender" on the wrapper and dropped it back in the post... :)
I can't disclose the details of the "benchmark" I was doing because it pertains directly to some as-yet unpublished research. Sorry!
Compared to -O2, I got about 10% overall improvement with -O3 -funroll-loops -march=pentium3 -ffast-math. The last one isn't one you should use generally, though.
The code used a great deal of double-precision floating point, so you could probably get an even greater speedup on a P4 by enabling SSE2.
However, this particular fuel cell system is probably designed for safety and ease of refilling, and would have a battery or ultracapacitor backup, so the cartridges are probably not refillable on the fly - you have to stop the system, swap the fuel cartridge, and start it up again.
In the future, though, it's not hard to see people taking fuel-cell "generators" on camping trips.
Labor, the main opposition party, has already announced that they will block this. Neither the Democrats or Greens are likely to support it either. If so, it's dead in the water.
Not to mention the fact that there's a whole lot of Australians who like their net pr0n, and they won't be happy if the government actually implements something that stops them getting it.
Oh, and Alston is a complete fuckwad. I know a staffer for another minister, and even he thinks Alston is a dickhead and that his staff don't have a clue about their portfolio.
I don't know what the complete solution to this is, but simple authentication isn't it. At a first line of defence, what about some sanity checking on the routing information provided?
You may not be bitter, but from what little we hear about African politics and foriegn relationships I get the distinct impression that bitterness at whitey seems to be a fairly strong factor in at least some African countries' dealings with the west.
To give a pertinent example, the attitude of your country's government and that of the South African government towards Zimbabwe and the recent actions of its leadership, are very hard to explain.
As the situation is reported here, Mugabe is a violent thug who resorted to violence and fraud to win himself another term of government. His policy of taking land off white farmers and handing it over to black party cronies who have no idea how to farm the land is, as reported here, starving and improverishing his own people and bringing the economy of Zimbabwe to a complete halt.
Whilst I'm not familiar with the details, I do have a vague idea of how the farmers got hold of that land in the first place, how they live a lifestyle that most Africans could only dream about, and how they treated their employees in the past. However, sending the farms to lie fallow has led the country to economic ruin and the possibility of famine, forcibly seizing property without compensation (not to mention encouraging general lawlessness) is guaranteed to deter the foriegn investment which is an excellent way to improve living standards, and rather than helping the great majority of Zimbabweans these properties have been transferred from a few rich white people to a few rich friends of Mugabe.
Now, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK led the push to have Zimbabwe suspended from the Commonwealth. Yes, this is a largely symbolic slap on the wrist, but even that was fought tooth and nail by some of the African members of the Commonwealth. And now South Africa and Nigeria (along with Australia, a three-nation panel set up to monitor the situation in Zimbabwe) want to let Zimbabwe back in again!
It has been suggested in a couple of articles that part of the real reason that they want Zimbabwe readmitted is that at least there's a sneaking admiration for Mugabe for, well, sticking it up whitey, even if it is, aside from being brutal, disasterous for his country.
What's your take on the Zimbabwe sitation, and the reactions from other African governments? Am I being horribly racist? If there's another explanation for what's going on, what is it? Is the situation misreported in the West?
Oh, and, by the way, I do realise that Zimbabwe is a fair way away from Nigeria, but it's a hell of a lot closer to you than it is to me (I'm Australian).
This doesn't require every user to do stuff. It doesn't even require every sysadmin to do stuff. It just requires a reasonable number of sysadmins to do stuff.
To build a planetary probe you need to be able to build/extract/refine...
Until the cost of getting off Earth gets much lower, the capital cost of launching all the equipment and personnel necessary to run the kind of moon base you're talking about is going to be so massive as to be beyond the discretionary resources of even the US government for a while.
Though maybe "The awful truth", with, say, Christina Ricci and $(RANDOM_EX_BOY_BAND_MEMBER) would be an improvement...
I don't know how much of her current work is actually her writing. Nor do I know whether she will turn out to be some kind of musical genius. The point was that the musical zeitgeist has changed, and angst and rock are back in again.
Still, even given the rapaciousness of her management and record company, Britney will have made enough money to live like a princess for the rest of her life, so at this point I wouldn't really be caring terribly much if I were her.
Call me naive, but aren't they supposed to be experts in picking hit songs already, and if a computer program can do the job what the hell are they being paid to do?
Eventually all the things that can be done within the confines of a series, get done, and the series gets stale, particularly on character-driven shows like Buffy. (Law and Order, for example, is easier to sustain because it doesn't depend so much on character, more issues which they often pretty much rip out of the newspaper). With Buffy, they have done well to sustain things by letting the characters grow up, introducing and killing off other characters, and so on, but, still, it would be much easier to write for a new series where there's still room to flesh out the characters and play with new relationships, and produce better results.
So don't just think of what you're gaining from the umpteenth series of your favourite show, think of what you're losing by having your favourite writers struggle to take the characters places we haven't already seen before.
Theo is right.
The Loebner contest, today, is like offering a prize for the first successful trip to the moon would have been in, say, 1900. Visionary, but hopelessly overambitious.
If you want to do some statistics, there's also R, a stats analysis package. It's very powerful, but it's designed for experts rather than non-statisticians who occasionally want to crunch some numbers.
Incidentally, they were going to put a Beatles song on there but the Beatles' record company refused permission...
No, it didn't play Bach. Voyager probes have a disc on them which features, amongst other things, excerpts of classical music (I assume there's some Bach on there), but not Pioneer.