I'm a heavy KDE user but I keep switching DEs and WMs every now and then. Currently I'm playing with Enlightenment which is as pretty as it always has been. More importantly, it starts up on my aging laptop in less than 2 seconds, which is years ahead of both Gnome and KDE. As another lightweight but full-fledged alternative to the big two, I recommend it highly.
Great list. Some other good mathematical non-ficiton books I've liked are:
Anything by Marcus du Sautoy (Music of the Primes, Finding Moonshine)
Dr.Riemann's Zeros by Karl Sabbagh
Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos
There's nothing wrong a viral idea, and there's nothing wrong with admitting that an idea is viral. Your comment made me think of what first attracted me to the Free Software world. To any one who's discovered the elegant beauty of Darwin's evolutionary theory, there is an equal attractiveness in the way the GPL license is framed.
The very fact that the GPL attaches itself to the code its released under, and survives into the downstream modifications that are made to the code.. there are beautiful resemblances to the way successful life itself evolves.
I'm inclined to believe that licenses that are not viral (e.g. BSD) and depend on altruistic reasons to survive, are somehow doomed to extinction (i.e. will be swallowed by proprietary licenses that couldn't care less about perpetuating the BSD cause). In the long run, the GPL will emerge as the fitter license that made its way into the larger user base while retaining pefect copies of itself.
(Of course I'm neither a biologist nor a programmer, so apologies if I sound like I'm talking outta my ass.)
This is actually already possible. There are at least two types of v4-compatible v6 addresses (the first one's deprecated, I think):
::127.0.0.1
2002::127.0.0.1
Anytime you move from a v4 to a v6 network, your gateway automatically prepends the 2002:: prefix to make your IP a v6 address. The problem here is that you have to have a public IPv4 address for this to work. If you're inside a NAT'ted network, your private address wouldn't be translatable to a corresponding v6 equivalent.
p.s. a link.
Maybe someone could sell the whole thing in a book-sized rectangular box with a tiny keyboard and 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large, comforting letters in the front. Now that'd be cool.
*sigh* You're probably right. When the Novell deal came up, RedHat was quick to put a really nice article on their site assuring that they'd never do such a thing to their customers. Funny how times change. (Well, I just read that link again, and it still gives me some hope; it really does look like a well thought out plan, and not the usual PR fluff you'd expect.)
This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch,
and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.
I found some alternate theories that are also attempting to precisely measure the kilogram at everything2. They look pretty interesting, here's a small excerpt:
Superconducting levitation
This method works along essentially the same principles as the Watt Balance. In it, a superconductor of a known mass is placed within a superconducting coil. By running current through the coil, a magnetic field is generated that causes the superconducting mass to levitate. By levitating it at different positions and measuring the current required to do so, the magnetic flux can be calculated. Magnetic flux relates directly to Planck's constant, and because the force generated by the magnetically-induced levitation and the downward force of gravity must be equal, Planck's constant can thus be precisely related to the kilogram.
Hey wait, TFA skims over what they're going to do with the Silicon ball once its made. Again, from everything1:
X-ray interferometry is used to determine the distance between lattice planes in the silicon crystal, permitting physicists to determine, as closely as possible, the number of atoms in these spheres. Currently, a measurement accuracy of one part in 10^7 is possible, after considering all of the various sorts of error introduced in the process, but it is hoped that ten times this accuracy will be possible within five years.
.. not too many places. Spoonfeed and popurls are great for feeds. Popurls wins IMO because of one cool feature: if a Digg link looks interesting, you can go directly to the article by clicking on the tiny button on the right edge of each link.
P.S. Yet another horrible misuse of enlightenment's icon. Sad.
Exactly. When I read the line 'developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up', I thought, why's Sun getting worried, they're using the GPL after all, not the BSD license. Even if the returns are not monetary, the GPL at least guarantees positive, useful returns that every one can profit from.
A California judge dismissed the charges against Ms. Dunn in March and reduced the charges against three other defendants to misdemeanors.
The company agreed in December to pay $14.5 million to settle a civil lawsuit filed by the California attorney general in connection with the spying. The company has also apologized to the journalists.
Yeah, they really got punished the last time round. They actually had to apologise to all those journalists!
FTA: Add/Remove Applications lets you search the entire directory of applications recommended for Ubuntu -- dozens of programs in 11 categories -- and install them with little effort. I added applications like Adobe Reader and the Thunderbird mail client without too much difficulty. It all compares pretty favorably to Windows's Add/Remove Programs system, which should be familiar to everyone reading this.
I stopped reading after this. Anyone who thinks Ubuntu's package management 'compares favourably' to add/remove programs is not in his senses.
I'm in Bangalore of all places. Check out this page from my ISP, they mention a max speed of 512 kbps. (Their service and support is pretty cool and I'm happy with them on the whole, so I'll forgive them their flash-filled website that doesn't even open properly in Opera)
If they go through with this, it'll be really cool. Maybe, before that, just one small change would make me really happy. I have a 'broadband' conncetion right now, and the speed is a blazing 256 kbps. That's because that's what our Department of Telecommunications has defined the minimum speed to be, for an ISP to call its service as a broadband connection. Disappointing, somewhat.
Btw 256 kbps is also the maximum they're offering in my area in my city, I can't even upgrade if I want to.
This net neutrality argument has been going on for quite awhile, is there something I'm not getting? From what I know (not much), protocols like MPLS have QoS features to distinguish between types of traffic, and they supposedly do a decent job of it. What more is needed then? Is it not sufficient that packets be differentiated according to the Class of Service? Why do those that argue against Net neutrality seem to imply that differentiating among ISPs is somehow going to make an improvement?
Re:Does anyone even use this OS?
on
CentOS 5 Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Who uses CentOS? Well, the website of this *ahem* rather famous city runs on it:)
Re:say a word for PJ!
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 5, Informative
..she is one of the few public intellectuals who really inspire with her integrity, honesty, and quirkiness. I swear I almost shed a tear when she resigned from a paying job to quickly dispel the FUD-of-the-week about her.
I started reading Groklaw late, but I did find about this incident too. The link is here.
And here's a memorable quote from that post, where she's explaining her reasons for resigning: Money is nice, but integrity is everything. --PJ, Groklaw.
Truly an amazing lady.
Is this not the same thing Groklaw covered quite sometime back? There are several updates in the link, including a clarification from Allchin on that 'I'd buy a Mac' quote.
When I look at the VHS examples of long back, and the more recent DVD-region-encoding failure, it just looks like one big, sad cycle repeating itself every generation or so.
Even if we get over the current mess (Trusted Computing, RIAA etc), it looks like as if the big media dinosaurs will never really learn to adapt. Each time a new technology pops up that threatens their stable position, they panic immediately and create a huge fuss in trying to maintain the staus quo. If only they weren't so powerful already, they'd probably have died off by now; replaced by smarter, quicker companies that didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world.
Yeah, I agree. I personally feel tags are hyped way beyond their actual worth. I couldn't care less about 'conveying info across the blogosphere', but I'm genuinely interested in organising my own information neater (e.g. my bookamrks).
Look at gmail, frinstance. Labels replace folders, and a mail can have more than one label. More importantly, they're predefined, and the interface doesn;t really allow you to be prolific with your tagging.
Compare this with the crappy way del.icio.us allows you to put a billion tags for each link, and I can see why its such a mess. I agree with others here that something like tagging oughtn't to be standardised or they'll lose their whole purpose, but really, there are other reasonable solutions that atleast help in atleast reducing the amount of craptagging going on. I've experimented with Blinklist and del.icio.us, and my bookmarks in the former are far better tagged because I can actually see my existing tags while bookmarking a new site.
What you say is fair enough, roughly summarised as 'if you haven't done anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about anyway'. But what about the privacy issues involved? Would you like it if your creepy next door neighbour was filming you for a couple of hours every day, just waiting for you to make a wrong move? How about him selling a month's footage of your activities to any 'interested' party? He's got a noble excuse in case he's caught doing the recording, but you never what happens behind your back afterwards. People are of course free to do what they want in public places, but I sure as hell wouldn't feel comfortable about being recorded even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
To me, the most interesting question by far in EDGE has been the one on 'What do you believe to be true even though you can't prove it?' There were some really cool answers that year, e.g. this hilarious (but equally insightful) one from Leonard Susskind.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a heavy KDE user but I keep switching DEs and WMs every now and then. Currently I'm playing with Enlightenment which is as pretty as it always has been. More importantly, it starts up on my aging laptop in less than 2 seconds, which is years ahead of both Gnome and KDE. As another lightweight but full-fledged alternative to the big two, I recommend it highly.
Great list. Some other good mathematical non-ficiton books I've liked are:
Anything by Marcus du Sautoy (Music of the Primes, Finding Moonshine)
Dr.Riemann's Zeros by Karl Sabbagh
Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos
The very fact that the GPL attaches itself to the code its released under, and survives into the downstream modifications that are made to the code.. there are beautiful resemblances to the way successful life itself evolves.
I'm inclined to believe that licenses that are not viral (e.g. BSD) and depend on altruistic reasons to survive, are somehow doomed to extinction (i.e. will be swallowed by proprietary licenses that couldn't care less about perpetuating the BSD cause). In the long run, the GPL will emerge as the fitter license that made its way into the larger user base while retaining pefect copies of itself.
(Of course I'm neither a biologist nor a programmer, so apologies if I sound like I'm talking outta my ass.)
Heheh. I just did a search for 'site:slashdot.org gartner' and here are some weird analyses they've come up with in the past:
Gartner Says Linux PCs Just Used To Pirate Windows (2004)
Gartner Recommends Holding Onto The SCO Money (2003)
(Sure they got some better ones too, I just picked the funnies)
Anytime you move from a v4 to a v6 network, your gateway automatically prepends the 2002:: prefix to make your IP a v6 address. The problem here is that you have to have a public IPv4 address for this to work. If you're inside a NAT'ted network, your private address wouldn't be translatable to a corresponding v6 equivalent.
p.s. a link.
Maybe someone could sell the whole thing in a book-sized rectangular box with a tiny keyboard and 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large, comforting letters in the front.
Now that'd be cool.
*sigh* You're probably right. When the Novell deal came up, RedHat was quick to put a really nice article on their site assuring that they'd never do such a thing to their customers.
Funny how times change.
(Well, I just read that link again, and it still gives me some hope; it really does look like a well thought out plan, and not the usual PR fluff you'd expect.)
This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch, and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.
Oblig. maddox link.
I found some alternate theories that are also attempting to precisely measure the kilogram at everything2. They look pretty interesting, here's a small excerpt:
Hey wait, TFA skims over what they're going to do with the Silicon ball once its made. Again, from everything1:
.. not too many places. Spoonfeed and popurls are great for feeds. Popurls wins IMO because of one cool feature: if a Digg link looks interesting, you can go directly to the article by clicking on the tiny button on the right edge of each link.
P.S. Yet another horrible misuse of enlightenment's icon. Sad.
Exactly. When I read the line 'developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up', I thought, why's Sun getting worried, they're using the GPL after all, not the BSD license. Even if the returns are not monetary, the GPL at least guarantees positive, useful returns that every one can profit from.
FTA:
Add/Remove Applications lets you search the entire directory of applications recommended for Ubuntu -- dozens of programs in 11 categories -- and install them with little effort. I added applications like Adobe Reader and the Thunderbird mail client without too much difficulty. It all compares pretty favorably to Windows's Add/Remove Programs system, which should be familiar to everyone reading this.
I stopped reading after this. Anyone who thinks Ubuntu's package management 'compares favourably' to add/remove programs is not in his senses.
I'm in Bangalore of all places. Check out this page from my ISP, they mention a max speed of 512 kbps.
(Their service and support is pretty cool and I'm happy with them on the whole, so I'll forgive them their flash-filled website that doesn't even open properly in Opera)
If they go through with this, it'll be really cool. Maybe, before that, just one small change would make me really happy. I have a 'broadband' conncetion right now, and the speed is a blazing 256 kbps. That's because that's what our Department of Telecommunications has defined the minimum speed to be, for an ISP to call its service as a broadband connection. Disappointing, somewhat.
Btw 256 kbps is also the maximum they're offering in my area in my city, I can't even upgrade if I want to.
This net neutrality argument has been going on for quite awhile, is there something I'm not getting? From what I know (not much), protocols like MPLS have QoS features to distinguish between types of traffic, and they supposedly do a decent job of it. What more is needed then?
Is it not sufficient that packets be differentiated according to the Class of Service? Why do those that argue against Net neutrality seem to imply that differentiating among ISPs is somehow going to make an improvement?
Who uses CentOS? Well, the website of this *ahem* rather famous city runs on it :)
And here's a memorable quote from that post, where she's explaining her reasons for resigning:
Money is nice, but integrity is everything. --PJ, Groklaw.
Truly an amazing lady.
Is this not the same thing Groklaw covered quite sometime back? There are several updates in the link, including a clarification from Allchin on that 'I'd buy a Mac' quote.
When I look at the VHS examples of long back, and the more recent DVD-region-encoding failure, it just looks like one big, sad cycle repeating itself every generation or so.
Even if we get over the current mess (Trusted Computing, RIAA etc), it looks like as if the big media dinosaurs will never really learn to adapt. Each time a new technology pops up that threatens their stable position, they panic immediately and create a huge fuss in trying to maintain the staus quo.
If only they weren't so powerful already, they'd probably have died off by now; replaced by smarter, quicker companies that didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world.
Yeah, I agree. I personally feel tags are hyped way beyond their actual worth. I couldn't care less about 'conveying info across the blogosphere', but I'm genuinely interested in organising my own information neater (e.g. my bookamrks).
Look at gmail, frinstance. Labels replace folders, and a mail can have more than one label. More importantly, they're predefined, and the interface doesn;t really allow you to be prolific with your tagging.
Compare this with the crappy way del.icio.us allows you to put a billion tags for each link, and I can see why its such a mess.
I agree with others here that something like tagging oughtn't to be standardised or they'll lose their whole purpose, but really, there are other reasonable solutions that atleast help in atleast reducing the amount of craptagging going on. I've experimented with Blinklist and del.icio.us, and my bookmarks in the former are far better tagged because I can actually see my existing tags while bookmarking a new site.
What you say is fair enough, roughly summarised as 'if you haven't done anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about anyway'.
But what about the privacy issues involved? Would you like it if your creepy next door neighbour was filming you for a couple of hours every day, just waiting for you to make a wrong move? How about him selling a month's footage of your activities to any 'interested' party? He's got a noble excuse in case he's caught doing the recording, but you never what happens behind your back afterwards.
People are of course free to do what they want in public places, but I sure as hell wouldn't feel comfortable about being recorded even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
To me, the most interesting question by far in EDGE has been the one on 'What do you believe to be true even though you can't prove it?' There were some really cool answers that year, e.g. this hilarious (but equally insightful) one from Leonard Susskind.