I dunno, could have been the Via chipset, but my box crashed and burned with the drivers on the CD I was shipped. Updated drivers fixed the problem, but shipping drivers with such a bad bug is unacceptable in my book.
Will it repair the many bugs that have been crashing GNOME?
What bugs that keep crashing GNOME? GNOME 1.0 was a POS, but the latest versions are absolutely fine.
Will Enlightenment finally run faster?
If you run a nice clean theme, probably. If you run an all-singing, all-dancing, ridiculous theme, probably not.
Will Samba be upgraded to run in Windows 2000 networks?
Will Microsoft stop changing their protocol for no other reason than to break Samba?
Will OSS finally have a latency of less than 70ms?
Will Creative release Windows drivers that don't crash your system every time you attempt to play a sound?
Will anyone care?
I don't - I'm happily running Debian and intend to stay running Debian!
Needs a further optimization to be a party DJ
on
Lego Mindstorms DJ
·
· Score: 2
...and if still no-one's dancing, it goes to the "crappiest lowest-common-denominator novelty tracks of the 70's and 80's" CD (featuring Mickey, YMCA, Blame It On The Boogie and their ilk) and leaves it on repeat for the rest of the night:(
They've obviously built by far the cheapest barcode scanner available.
Barcode scanning is a really useful thing to do, and can be used for a whole lot of things
The people hacking their scanners have demonstrated that there is a demand for a cheap barcode scanner. Sure, many people wouldn't have paid *anything* for it, but I'd bet that if you made it cheap enough there would still be quite a few that would buy it.
Therefore, why not do away with the digital economy silliness and just *sell* the CueCat?
I assume you're trolling, but for the benefit of everyone else I'd just like to point at Twofish, a highly secure algorithm released royalty-free by the authors. Why did they do that? Simple. The reputation you gain from being known as the designer of a very-widely-used cypher is worth far more than the potential royalties from people licensing your cypher.
It strikes me that whenever a company comes out with something where they intend to make their profits from after-sale mechanisms, the first thing that people want to do is to try and avoid this.
Well, knock me down with a feather!
If companies are basing their business model on after-sale mechanisms, and they intend to rely on technical means to compel people to pay them money, it's obvious that somebody is going to try and get around it.
Instead of trying to use *technical* means to do this, have they considered a) contracts, and b) making the extra-cost services sufficiently compelling to justify their customers spending money? If you're going to use a lock-in strategy, why not be up-front about it like the mobile phone companies, and be prepared to offer a contract-free version at the full retail price.
While approx 2/3's of Australia's surface is arid, there are still very large areas that aren't (or are irrigated), and many areas except the absolute driest still support massive cattle stations the size of Switzerland or Ireland. The really remote areas are of course not on the main power grid and rely on deisel generation (or solar cells), and would be naturals for this technology.
As for using the methane produced by animals, it might be feasible for feedlot/intensive farming, but it doesn't really make sense for extensive grazing, as you would likely use more energy collecting the manure than you'd get from burning / catalyzing the methane. In that case, it's generally more efficient to let the animal waste go back into the soil.
Could the revolution in fuel cell power start in the outback?
Australia, like the US, has large areas of relatively sparsely populated country over which mains power is delivered. Thanks to government subsidies, this power is made available at similar rates to city dwellers. These days, however, power generation has been privatised, and subsidisation for mains power installations have been greatly reduced. While piped gas isn't available, it's fairly easy to truck in large amounts of propane and store it in tanks. Isn't it possible it might make more economic sense to encourage the installation of these fuel cell systems rather than maintain the massive mains infrastructure?
In this case, though, Mr 4Life is probably referring to Three Letter Agencies, such as the CIA and NSA, and more broadly the FBI, KGB, and similar agencies around the world.
If your goal is a secure system -- then it is possible (even if unlikely) to create a secure system!
Define secure. Secure against guys from a TLA coming round and beating the information out of the sysadmin?
What you can actually do is assess what threats you wish to defend against, what compromises in usability and other functionality you are prepared to accept, and design a system that provides defenses against the expected threats.
In related news, Melbourne, Australia Linux user Goonie, in between receiving massive email attachments with spy shots of the opening ceremony rehearsal, and discussing appropriate drinking games for the occasion, agreed with friartux. He added "If you want speed and rewritability, you'd use an orb drive anyway".
Re:Ahem.... the REAL first mouse is:
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 2
C'mon... the real star of that show was always Baron Sylus Greenback and his henchmen.
BTW, I think I can hear the "whoosh" of this thread going straight over the heads of the US-based readership:)
Linus was apparently frustrated by the slow progress that Minix was making, which drove him to start work on his own Unix clone.
Read This USENET thread archive for more information about embryonic Linux. It wasn't just that Minix was crappy for practical use, it was that Andrew Tanenbaum wouldn't let anybody distribute modified versions of Minix.
and the jury is still out on whether you can make a playable copy of a DVD, I've yet to hear any convincing evidence for either side)
I can personally verify that on a trip to HK in August last year, I saw a DVD copy of "Mercury Rising" (I think that's what it's called, it was a Bruce Willis movie about a kid who cracked the NSA's super-secret code...). As far as I could tell, it had been duplicated from the official CD.
Given that if this thing's built, it'll be mostly funded by the the the US, Europe, and Japan, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot easier to dispense with the UN's famous bureacracy and fund it through agreement between just those countries that want to come on board?
Since you believe no god exists, you are an atheist and definately not at all agnostic.
What about the position "On present evidence I believe that God does not exist, but I can't prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. If new evidence on the matter comes to light, I will re-evaluate my position."
What does that make me, according to your neat little five-way test?
But don't think you can equate computer gaming to a high intensity sport.
What about table tennis? While most Westerners think of "ping pong" as an amusing pastime, it's very much considered a serious sport in Asia. If you've seen some of the top-ranked Chinese players you've got to have a pile of respect for their freakish reaction time and motor control. I'd expect that they'd make pretty good computer gamers...
After all, how many ski jumpers go around saying "d00d!! I cl3ared 4 g1bs0n$!! 1M l33t!!"
Have you ever listened to a sprinter? Their posturing sounds pretty much like a different dialect of "1M 1h3 13373s7 of a11!".
Re:MODERATORS: sucked in by reverse psychology!
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 2
Really what good is it to claim somebody is uniformed and than call to the moderators to back your unmotivated opinion up?
Because claiming that GNOME is "obsolete" on the grounds that it uses C instead of C++ is, IMHO, grossly uninformed, and didn't even deserve explanation. 90% of what makes code easy or hard to maintain is how well it is designed and presented, and maybe 10% is due to the language. I'd much prefer to have to maintain well-written
FORTRAN than badly written Java, and, from most of the stuff I've looked at, GTK+ and GNOME are well-written.
MODERATORS: sucked in by reverse psychology!
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 1
Now for some flamebait:
Once again, moderators have been sucked in by a comment along the lines of "I'm going to get moderated down for this, but...". In general, I think that any post containing such a remark should be moderated down because it's an attempt to unduly influence the moderators. In this specfic case, the second half of this comment is grossly uninformed and/or just flamebait and deserved to be moderated down. There was NO justification for moderating this comment up.
I call for some debate on an explicit addition to the moderation guidelines that these kind of appeals should cause a comment to be moderated down. Does anyone else out there care?
Of course, I realize I'm going to be modded down for this flamebait:)
Previous threads have mentioned how much Crays sucked at general computing tasks (rather than the very fast number crunching that they excelled at).
Could somebody explain to me why you would *ever* run emacs, vi, or the like on one of these babies? Wouldn't it have been far more efficient to have cross-compilers and the like, and only ever run code that the Cray was built to run - cracking Russian cyphers, forecasting weather etc. etc.?
I'm all for making the web accessible to everyone, including those whose native language is not English, but this could lead to website that are virtually inaccessible to somebody who doesn't have the correct keyboard and/or input software. This is a bad thing.
However, if you had some kind of translation software that automatically mapped the local character set back to ASCII (and of course disallowed name clashes for the mapped names when registration occurred), it could be a win/win situation both for making the DNS more useful for non-english speakers, and keeping the net globally accessible.
Personally, I'de love to see an american gold metal winner listening to the national anthem, with a tear in her eye, rip off her shirt and reveal a sports bra with MICROSOFT SUCKS across each tit.
Or maybe you would like a Japanese athlete with "Whale - nutritious AND tasty!" Or perhaps a North Korean athlete with "Nuke an imperialist today!" A Rwandan athlete with "Hutus take it up the ass"?. While I think the IOC have a lot to answer for, this restriction is necessary to avoid turning the Olympics into any more of a political bunfight than it already is.
It's quite a significant political issue in Australia at the moment, because Australia's only realistic chance for a track gold medal is Aboriginal, and will possibly wish to carry the Aboriginal flag as well as the Australian flag on her victory lap if she wins. While it will be a terrible shame if she is prevented from doing so, or suffers consequences if she does, to be fair on the IOC, how is it supposed to decide what political statements are acceptable, and which aren't?
Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8?
simple solution to that problem:
man ascii | lpr
Take printout to local engraver, engrave contents of printout on gold sheet (satellite costs >10^7 dollars, cost of gold lost in noise, weight negligible if you make the gold nice and thin).
Oh, and while you're at it, you might get your engraver to add crucial bits of the various CD recording standards.
Place gold sheet in satellite.
If you see what archaeologists can figure out with stuff just dumped around randomly, I have do doubt that the archaeologists of 50,000 years from now will be able to figure this stuff out.
I still like the idea mentioned in a past Slashdot story of engraving stuff really small onto (metallic?) discs. That way all you need is a 1800's-era microscope to get useful information.
The people who are best placed to fight this are those directly affected - the students and academics at the institutions concerned. Most of the academics I know care deeply about their students, and also care deeply about making access to information as free as possible. This kind of scheme is going to rip off students (who are already getting royally screwed on textbooks anyway), annoy teachers (amongst other things, it will make tutorial sessions more difficult as students rarely have access to computers in group tutorial sessions) and disadvantage everyone except the university administrators and the company producing this product. Therefore, students and academics should act to prevent its introduction.
Don't American universities have student associations, and staff associations (here in socialist old Oz we even have the temerity to call them unions) to fight this kind of battle?
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, could have been the Via chipset, but my box crashed and burned with the drivers on the CD I was shipped. Updated drivers fixed the problem, but shipping drivers with such a bad bug is unacceptable in my book.
If you run a nice clean theme, probably. If you run an all-singing, all-dancing, ridiculous theme, probably not.
Will Microsoft stop changing their protocol for no other reason than to break Samba?
Will Creative release Windows drivers that don't crash your system every time you attempt to play a sound?
I don't - I'm happily running Debian and intend to stay running Debian!
...and if still no-one's dancing, it goes to the "crappiest lowest-common-denominator novelty tracks of the 70's and 80's" CD (featuring Mickey, YMCA, Blame It On The Boogie and their ilk) and leaves it on repeat for the rest of the night :(
I assume you're trolling, but for the benefit of everyone else I'd just like to point at Twofish, a highly secure algorithm released royalty-free by the authors. Why did they do that? Simple. The reputation you gain from being known as the designer of a very-widely-used cypher is worth far more than the potential royalties from people licensing your cypher.
Video editing. Believe me, it's going to be huge.
Well, knock me down with a feather!
If companies are basing their business model on after-sale mechanisms, and they intend to rely on technical means to compel people to pay them money, it's obvious that somebody is going to try and get around it.
Instead of trying to use *technical* means to do this, have they considered a) contracts, and b) making the extra-cost services sufficiently compelling to justify their customers spending money? If you're going to use a lock-in strategy, why not be up-front about it like the mobile phone companies, and be prepared to offer a contract-free version at the full retail price.
While approx 2/3's of Australia's surface is arid, there are still very large areas that aren't (or are irrigated), and many areas except the absolute driest still support massive cattle stations the size of Switzerland or Ireland. The really remote areas are of course not on the main power grid and rely on deisel generation (or solar cells), and would be naturals for this technology.
As for using the methane produced by animals, it might be feasible for feedlot/intensive farming, but it doesn't really make sense for extensive grazing, as you would likely use more energy collecting the manure than you'd get from burning / catalyzing the methane. In that case, it's generally more efficient to let the animal waste go back into the soil.
Australia, like the US, has large areas of relatively sparsely populated country over which mains power is delivered. Thanks to government subsidies, this power is made available at similar rates to city dwellers. These days, however, power generation has been privatised, and subsidisation for mains power installations have been greatly reduced. While piped gas isn't available, it's fairly easy to truck in large amounts of propane and store it in tanks. Isn't it possible it might make more economic sense to encourage the installation of these fuel cell systems rather than maintain the massive mains infrastructure?
In this case, though, Mr 4Life is probably referring to Three Letter Agencies, such as the CIA and NSA, and more broadly the FBI, KGB, and similar agencies around the world.
Define secure. Secure against guys from a TLA coming round and beating the information out of the sysadmin?
What you can actually do is assess what threats you wish to defend against, what compromises in usability and other functionality you are prepared to accept, and design a system that provides defenses against the expected threats.
In related news, Melbourne, Australia Linux user Goonie, in between receiving massive email attachments with spy shots of the opening ceremony rehearsal, and discussing appropriate drinking games for the occasion, agreed with friartux. He added "If you want speed and rewritability, you'd use an orb drive anyway".
BTW, I think I can hear the "whoosh" of this thread going straight over the heads of the US-based readership
Read This USENET thread archive for more information about embryonic Linux. It wasn't just that Minix was crappy for practical use, it was that Andrew Tanenbaum wouldn't let anybody distribute modified versions of Minix.
I can personally verify that on a trip to HK in August last year, I saw a DVD copy of "Mercury Rising" (I think that's what it's called, it was a Bruce Willis movie about a kid who cracked the NSA's super-secret code...). As far as I could tell, it had been duplicated from the official CD.
Given that if this thing's built, it'll be mostly funded by the the the US, Europe, and Japan, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot easier to dispense with the UN's famous bureacracy and fund it through agreement between just those countries that want to come on board?
What about the position "On present evidence I believe that God does not exist, but I can't prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. If new evidence on the matter comes to light, I will re-evaluate my position."
What does that make me, according to your neat little five-way test?
What about table tennis? While most Westerners think of "ping pong" as an amusing pastime, it's very much considered a serious sport in Asia. If you've seen some of the top-ranked Chinese players you've got to have a pile of respect for their freakish reaction time and motor control. I'd expect that they'd make pretty good computer gamers...
Have you ever listened to a sprinter? Their posturing sounds pretty much like a different dialect of "1M 1h3 13373s7 of a11!".
Because claiming that GNOME is "obsolete" on the grounds that it uses C instead of C++ is, IMHO, grossly uninformed, and didn't even deserve explanation. 90% of what makes code easy or hard to maintain is how well it is designed and presented, and maybe 10% is due to the language. I'd much prefer to have to maintain well-written FORTRAN than badly written Java, and, from most of the stuff I've looked at, GTK+ and GNOME are well-written.
Once again, moderators have been sucked in by a comment along the lines of "I'm going to get moderated down for this, but...". In general, I think that any post containing such a remark should be moderated down because it's an attempt to unduly influence the moderators. In this specfic case, the second half of this comment is grossly uninformed and/or just flamebait and deserved to be moderated down. There was NO justification for moderating this comment up.
I call for some debate on an explicit addition to the moderation guidelines that these kind of appeals should cause a comment to be moderated down. Does anyone else out there care?
Of course, I realize I'm going to be modded down for this flamebait :)
Could somebody explain to me why you would *ever* run emacs, vi, or the like on one of these babies? Wouldn't it have been far more efficient to have cross-compilers and the like, and only ever run code that the Cray was built to run - cracking Russian cyphers, forecasting weather etc. etc.?
However, if you had some kind of translation software that automatically mapped the local character set back to ASCII (and of course disallowed name clashes for the mapped names when registration occurred), it could be a win/win situation both for making the DNS more useful for non-english speakers, and keeping the net globally accessible.
Or maybe you would like a Japanese athlete with "Whale - nutritious AND tasty!" Or perhaps a North Korean athlete with "Nuke an imperialist today!" A Rwandan athlete with "Hutus take it up the ass"?. While I think the IOC have a lot to answer for, this restriction is necessary to avoid turning the Olympics into any more of a political bunfight than it already is.
It's quite a significant political issue in Australia at the moment, because Australia's only realistic chance for a track gold medal is Aboriginal, and will possibly wish to carry the Aboriginal flag as well as the Australian flag on her victory lap if she wins. While it will be a terrible shame if she is prevented from doing so, or suffers consequences if she does, to be fair on the IOC, how is it supposed to decide what political statements are acceptable, and which aren't?
simple solution to that problem:
Oh, and while you're at it, you might get your engraver to add crucial bits of the various CD recording standards.
If you see what archaeologists can figure out with stuff just dumped around randomly, I have do doubt that the archaeologists of 50,000 years from now will be able to figure this stuff out.
I still like the idea mentioned in a past Slashdot story of engraving stuff really small onto (metallic?) discs. That way all you need is a 1800's-era microscope to get useful information.
Don't American universities have student associations, and staff associations (here in socialist old Oz we even have the temerity to call them unions) to fight this kind of battle?