The XO laptops connect through a school Jabber server, so if his laptop was set to use the same Jabber server, then he could see all of the people at that school, even if he's not on their local wireless network.
This sounds great, but I feel that by turning HTML into a more well-formed document (i.e., XML instead of SGML), the W3C did browser writers and developers a service. Please, let's not go back to the "guess if there's a closing tag" game. I don't mind the script, frame, module, CSS, encoding, and entity changes, but the custom tags/attributes and looser format limits (quoting, ending tags) seem bad.
Most of academia (at least MIT and CMU, where I've been as an intern and a student, respectively) seems to hand out public IP's with almost everything open to the world. The only thing that's not open is usually Windows networking ports, because of the major problems it would cause if anyone had open shares. But port 80 is definitely accessible from anywhere.
Let's just make this discussion easier: The limit I got was $1000. It's a student card, and that's as high as the limit goes. Perhaps in six months or a year I'll be able to get a regular card with a higher limit, assuming the bill gets paid on time (which I can't see being a problem, because I pay it as soon as I get it). And, indeed, the reason I have paid it off in the middle of the month is because I had made a major purchase, and the balance would have been up in the $600's, and I wanted to keep more headroom than that.
I disagree. I'm a college freshman, and I just picked up one of the Linux Fund credit cards. I'm not in any sort of debt -- in fact, I pay off the card in full every month, if not more often (if I've made a large purchase) to keep the balance down. If you pay for all your purchases at the end of every month, a credit card is an awesome tool to simplify your life rather than a potential source of monstrous debt. Just don't spend what you don't have, and you'll be fine.
Do you know that in Mass that if you sell lottery tickets, you are barred from ever suggesting to someone that they have spent too much money or perhaps should seek help?
/me holds up his "[citation needed]" sign. I've never heard this, but it seems stupid. Do you have a link?
Not necessarily. If the two polarizers are in parallel, then, yes, it has to twist the light as it goes through to block it. But if the two polarizers are perpendicular, then black is the "default state", and light is blocked unless the liquid crystal twists it to let it through the second polarizer. (My Sony CLIE (SL-10) was like this -- it turned black when the device was off. It looked nice.)
Because I didn't have time to scan every team's website and list all of the sponsors. (Of course, it didn't make a difference, as Slashdot sat on the story for over 12 hours, instead of releasing it soon after the results were announced.) Then we reach the problem with GNU/Linux: we get "Carnegie Mellon and General Motors and Caterpillar and Intel and Google and Applanix and Tele Atlas and Castle Commerce Center and Vector and Ibeo and Mobileye and NetApp and CarSim Mechanical Simulation and Hewlett Packard and Clean Power Resources and Macom and Viewpoint Production Services and McCabe Software's Tartan Racing Team". I assume you just meant I should include GM, but then who gets included and who doesn't? I figure, each team that won came from a university, so I'll list those, and you can go to the team websites to find out more.
Sorry. I'm the one who posted the story. I was giddy from hearing we won and it never even occurred to me to make such a link -- I was busier making links to all the teams.
Wait, what am I saying? This is Slashdot. Use Google.
Looks like the UAT guys are getting a little more than they bargained for... the site is still up, but took ~30 seconds to load... looks like it's slowing down. Plus no text version of the main site = they lose.
Miguel de fucking Icaza has been kissing Microsoft's ass for years now. Can we please get rid of him already?!
I was just about to say something closely approximating that.
What annoyed me most before this (which is simply unthinkable) was his extremely strong support of Mono. Personally, I feel that Mono, like Wine, should be treated as a compatibility layer to run software intended for other operating systems, not a viable target for open-source application developers. If everyone likes C# so much, then we should take matters into our own hands and implement a language with the features we like that is under our control! (My concern with Mono following Microsoft's language is that in the event that Microsoft changes a significant feature, like Java did when it added assert, Mono would almost certainly make the same change, leaving a bunch of open-source developers to deal with the whims of Microsoft.)
At some point, until Microsoft starts releasing truly open-source code and letting everyone hack on Windows, we have to keep at least some distance from Microsoft. There's nothing wrong with attempting to run their software, but we shouldn't be writing Windows software just because it's more convenient and we now have a way to run it on Linux.
Hey, I hear Comcast is looking for writers to create the ads that say their 8 Mb cable is "10x faster" than the "768kb" DSL we're all apparently using.
Er, email is on the order of 10K per message. Photo editing is on the order of 10M-10G per image, depending on the size of image you're using. That's a very big difference.
Your point that usability is important is true. However, your implication that progress in the kernel prevents progress elsewhere is questionable. There are plenty of people working on usability and creating new desktop interfaces. I'd argue that a current installation of Ubuntu, installed on cooperative hardware, is quite easy to use. But there's no need to sacrifice the underlying elegance or power of Linux to get there -- the shell shouldn't be "hard to find", just unnecessary for most people.
To drag out some car analogies: 1. There's no reason the engineers can't still work on the engine while the designers are still working on making the "driver experience" simpler and more comfortable. 2. It's a good idea to reduce the regular maintenance that a driver needs to perform, but there's no need to weld the hood shut or lock it just to prove to yourself that they don't need to fiddle with it.
you do realize that with the power consumption of a PS3, your folding is spending a few dollars a month right?
And? Assuming it costs $5, that's $60 per year. Consider that 1. you're playing games some of that time, and the machine is off some of the time, so the cost may well be only $30-$50, and 2. it's for a good cause. Multiply out the number of people running Folding@Home, on PS3's and on PC's, and you'll realize that F@H is getting the equivalent of a lot of donations, without the overhead of maintaining all the boxes themselves. 600,000 PS3 clients -- let's estimate that the average one is only on 1/4 of the time, so we have the equivalent of 150,000 machines running full-time at a cost of $60 per year. That's $900,000 of power, plus (assuming they're $500 each, from a quick Google search) runtime on $75,000,000 worth of machines at any given time. In other words, without that stack of PS3's, there's no way they could do the research they're doing, so you should support them.
Your comment seems to miss the point. First, DRM, like encryption, can be used for good or bad purposes. Properly controlled, you can use it to deny thieves access to your laptop or deny them the ability to remove the DRM, while still allowing you (with cryptographic authentication) to modify it. The point of tracking down the thief is to recover the laptop, since it is worth quite a bit of money. Sure, insurance will cover it, but if you can save the deductible by just finding it, why not? I also disagree that laptop trackers "betray" the free software philosophy by definition. As long as *you* are in control, and could uninstall the software if you wanted, there's no problem.
Second, please don't try to explain how we shouldn't be annoyed when people steal our stuff because they need the money. That's a slippery slope that leads in a bad direction. Besides, like I said, it's about getting the data back.
This is sorta dumb... They are, like many music stores, offering music in protected WMA format. I don't think this has much to do with Universal wanting to give Apple the finger, but a lot to do with the fact that Apple doesn't allow third parties to interoperate with FairPlay DRM. I think it's fine for Universal not to care -- Apple is being selfish, so why should Universal add value to the iPod with free music?
I'd say hospital equipment shouldn't malfunction when presented with interference on a widely used spectrum, but that's just me.
Yes, but... 1. Medical equipment manufacturers have a lot of things to worry about already. They have tons of hoops to jump through to make sure that it never endangers people under normal operating conditions. The equipment already costs a ton, because of the amount of time that manufacturers have to sink into things like FDA approval. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but just that it does drive up costs.) Cell phones are the last thing they want to have to worry about. 2. Even if it was well-shielded, you'd have the airline problem. Hospitals, afraid that older or badly-designed equipment would still be vulnerable, would still put up "Please turn off cell phones" signs, just to be safe.
I'm sure in the next decade or so, this problem will be corrected. But don't expect it to happen quickly, because I don't remember hearing about any incidents where a patient was actually harmed because a machine malfunctioned in real life. (Feel free to point them out if they have happened -- I haven't looked for them at all; I just assumed it would be a big enough deal that it would receive media coverage that I'd notice.)
I've read that IPv6, because it includes the MAC...
IPv6 only includes the MAC if it is configured using Stateless Autoconfiguration, and if Privacy Extensions are not turned on. If it is configured using some stateful method, like DHCPv6 or a static IPv6 address, the address could be anything. Likewise, if Privacy Extensions are turned on, then Stateless Autoconfiguration will rotate among random address that don't include the MAC, but are still unlikely to collide with other hosts' addresses.
But what good does knowing someone's MAC address do you? You can identify if they switch IP's, maybe, but then what? Botnets rely on hundreds of thousands (or, in this case, millions) of machines with different addresses and ISP's, so knowing the MAC of one would not help much. If a MAC was all you had to go on, it might help, but by the time you tracked down the MAC of one host, they'd have switched through dozens of others, and there'd be no information for you on the host you tracked down.
Alcohol based cleaners are also (surprisingly) easier on your hands than the old water-and-soap method.
Er, from personal experience, I'd beg to differ. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer dries out my hands and leaves them feeling more "raw" compared to regular soap and water. I'm not sure what the cumulative effect of having to wash your hands dozens of times a day would be, nor how well you'd have to wash with soap and water before it's considered to be as effective as using the alcohol-based stuff.
Of course they're running old and outdated hardware. When thing work, particularly in a mission critical situation, you don't touch them! Even if the IT admins knew that computer was old and on the brink of dying, how are they supposed to convince the suits and beancounters of that? Non-technical people take the approach that since computers are inherently binary (work or no-work) that if the machine is up and running _right now_ then there is no problem and no sense on spending money to replace it.
There's no reason you can't leave the almost-broken computer there and get a new one. You just build a backup system. Surely management understands that redundancy is good. Then, when the crappy one breaks, you can swap it out instantly. That way, you don't have to mess with things prematurely, but you're only down for hopefully a few minutes. (Of course, replacing it "intentionally", before it fails, is more reliable, but keeping a backup system is a viable alternative if nobody wants to touch the working system.)
Slashdot Mirror
The XO laptops connect through a school Jabber server, so if his laptop was set to use the same Jabber server, then he could see all of the people at that school, even if he's not on their local wireless network.
Er...
The article didn't mention Mexico ordering any. Someone ordered them to be distributed in Mexico.
This sounds great, but I feel that by turning HTML into a more well-formed document (i.e., XML instead of SGML), the W3C did browser writers and developers a service. Please, let's not go back to the "guess if there's a closing tag" game. I don't mind the script, frame, module, CSS, encoding, and entity changes, but the custom tags/attributes and looser format limits (quoting, ending tags) seem bad.
Most of academia (at least MIT and CMU, where I've been as an intern and a student, respectively) seems to hand out public IP's with almost everything open to the world. The only thing that's not open is usually Windows networking ports, because of the major problems it would cause if anyone had open shares. But port 80 is definitely accessible from anywhere.
Let's just make this discussion easier: The limit I got was $1000. It's a student card, and that's as high as the limit goes. Perhaps in six months or a year I'll be able to get a regular card with a higher limit, assuming the bill gets paid on time (which I can't see being a problem, because I pay it as soon as I get it). And, indeed, the reason I have paid it off in the middle of the month is because I had made a major purchase, and the balance would have been up in the $600's, and I wanted to keep more headroom than that.
I disagree. I'm a college freshman, and I just picked up one of the Linux Fund credit cards. I'm not in any sort of debt -- in fact, I pay off the card in full every month, if not more often (if I've made a large purchase) to keep the balance down. If you pay for all your purchases at the end of every month, a credit card is an awesome tool to simplify your life rather than a potential source of monstrous debt. Just don't spend what you don't have, and you'll be fine.
/me holds up his "[citation needed]" sign. I've never heard this, but it seems stupid. Do you have a link?
It's a shame you didn't tell us what the other community is, otherwise I would have visited it.
Not necessarily. If the two polarizers are in parallel, then, yes, it has to twist the light as it goes through to block it. But if the two polarizers are perpendicular, then black is the "default state", and light is blocked unless the liquid crystal twists it to let it through the second polarizer. (My Sony CLIE (SL-10) was like this -- it turned black when the device was off. It looked nice.)
Mine. It's the Samsung SGH-A707. It's quite featureful, but it's certainly not a "smart phone".
Because I didn't have time to scan every team's website and list all of the sponsors. (Of course, it didn't make a difference, as Slashdot sat on the story for over 12 hours, instead of releasing it soon after the results were announced.) Then we reach the problem with GNU/Linux: we get "Carnegie Mellon and General Motors and Caterpillar and Intel and Google and Applanix and Tele Atlas and Castle Commerce Center and Vector and Ibeo and Mobileye and NetApp and CarSim Mechanical Simulation and Hewlett Packard and Clean Power Resources and Macom and Viewpoint Production Services and McCabe Software's Tartan Racing Team". I assume you just meant I should include GM, but then who gets included and who doesn't? I figure, each team that won came from a university, so I'll list those, and you can go to the team websites to find out more.
Sorry. I'm the one who posted the story. I was giddy from hearing we won and it never even occurred to me to make such a link -- I was busier making links to all the teams.
Wait, what am I saying? This is Slashdot. Use Google.
;-)
Looks like the UAT guys are getting a little more than they bargained for... the site is still up, but took ~30 seconds to load... looks like it's slowing down. Plus no text version of the main site = they lose.
I was just about to say something closely approximating that.
What annoyed me most before this (which is simply unthinkable) was his extremely strong support of Mono. Personally, I feel that Mono, like Wine, should be treated as a compatibility layer to run software intended for other operating systems, not a viable target for open-source application developers. If everyone likes C# so much, then we should take matters into our own hands and implement a language with the features we like that is under our control! (My concern with Mono following Microsoft's language is that in the event that Microsoft changes a significant feature, like Java did when it added assert, Mono would almost certainly make the same change, leaving a bunch of open-source developers to deal with the whims of Microsoft.)
At some point, until Microsoft starts releasing truly open-source code and letting everyone hack on Windows, we have to keep at least some distance from Microsoft. There's nothing wrong with attempting to run their software, but we shouldn't be writing Windows software just because it's more convenient and we now have a way to run it on Linux.
Hey, I hear Comcast is looking for writers to create the ads that say their 8 Mb cable is "10x faster" than the "768kb" DSL we're all apparently using.
Er, email is on the order of 10K per message. Photo editing is on the order of 10M-10G per image, depending on the size of image you're using. That's a very big difference.
Good luck with that. I'd love to see how you're going to implement full-blown, resource-heavy photo editing in a browser.
And I don't really see any competitors offering online photo editing on the level of Photoshop... there's probably a reason for that.
I'll bite.
Your point that usability is important is true. However, your implication that progress in the kernel prevents progress elsewhere is questionable. There are plenty of people working on usability and creating new desktop interfaces. I'd argue that a current installation of Ubuntu, installed on cooperative hardware, is quite easy to use. But there's no need to sacrifice the underlying elegance or power of Linux to get there -- the shell shouldn't be "hard to find", just unnecessary for most people.
To drag out some car analogies: 1. There's no reason the engineers can't still work on the engine while the designers are still working on making the "driver experience" simpler and more comfortable. 2. It's a good idea to reduce the regular maintenance that a driver needs to perform, but there's no need to weld the hood shut or lock it just to prove to yourself that they don't need to fiddle with it.
And? Assuming it costs $5, that's $60 per year. Consider that 1. you're playing games some of that time, and the machine is off some of the time, so the cost may well be only $30-$50, and 2. it's for a good cause. Multiply out the number of people running Folding@Home, on PS3's and on PC's, and you'll realize that F@H is getting the equivalent of a lot of donations, without the overhead of maintaining all the boxes themselves. 600,000 PS3 clients -- let's estimate that the average one is only on 1/4 of the time, so we have the equivalent of 150,000 machines running full-time at a cost of $60 per year. That's $900,000 of power, plus (assuming they're $500 each, from a quick Google search) runtime on $75,000,000 worth of machines at any given time. In other words, without that stack of PS3's, there's no way they could do the research they're doing, so you should support them.
Your comment seems to miss the point. First, DRM, like encryption, can be used for good or bad purposes. Properly controlled, you can use it to deny thieves access to your laptop or deny them the ability to remove the DRM, while still allowing you (with cryptographic authentication) to modify it. The point of tracking down the thief is to recover the laptop, since it is worth quite a bit of money. Sure, insurance will cover it, but if you can save the deductible by just finding it, why not? I also disagree that laptop trackers "betray" the free software philosophy by definition. As long as *you* are in control, and could uninstall the software if you wanted, there's no problem.
Second, please don't try to explain how we shouldn't be annoyed when people steal our stuff because they need the money. That's a slippery slope that leads in a bad direction. Besides, like I said, it's about getting the data back.
This is sorta dumb... They are, like many music stores, offering music in protected WMA format. I don't think this has much to do with Universal wanting to give Apple the finger, but a lot to do with the fact that Apple doesn't allow third parties to interoperate with FairPlay DRM. I think it's fine for Universal not to care -- Apple is being selfish, so why should Universal add value to the iPod with free music?
Yes, but... 1. Medical equipment manufacturers have a lot of things to worry about already. They have tons of hoops to jump through to make sure that it never endangers people under normal operating conditions. The equipment already costs a ton, because of the amount of time that manufacturers have to sink into things like FDA approval. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but just that it does drive up costs.) Cell phones are the last thing they want to have to worry about. 2. Even if it was well-shielded, you'd have the airline problem. Hospitals, afraid that older or badly-designed equipment would still be vulnerable, would still put up "Please turn off cell phones" signs, just to be safe.
I'm sure in the next decade or so, this problem will be corrected. But don't expect it to happen quickly, because I don't remember hearing about any incidents where a patient was actually harmed because a machine malfunctioned in real life. (Feel free to point them out if they have happened -- I haven't looked for them at all; I just assumed it would be a big enough deal that it would receive media coverage that I'd notice.)
IPv6 only includes the MAC if it is configured using Stateless Autoconfiguration, and if Privacy Extensions are not turned on. If it is configured using some stateful method, like DHCPv6 or a static IPv6 address, the address could be anything. Likewise, if Privacy Extensions are turned on, then Stateless Autoconfiguration will rotate among random address that don't include the MAC, but are still unlikely to collide with other hosts' addresses.
But what good does knowing someone's MAC address do you? You can identify if they switch IP's, maybe, but then what? Botnets rely on hundreds of thousands (or, in this case, millions) of machines with different addresses and ISP's, so knowing the MAC of one would not help much. If a MAC was all you had to go on, it might help, but by the time you tracked down the MAC of one host, they'd have switched through dozens of others, and there'd be no information for you on the host you tracked down.
Er, from personal experience, I'd beg to differ. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer dries out my hands and leaves them feeling more "raw" compared to regular soap and water. I'm not sure what the cumulative effect of having to wash your hands dozens of times a day would be, nor how well you'd have to wash with soap and water before it's considered to be as effective as using the alcohol-based stuff.
There's no reason you can't leave the almost-broken computer there and get a new one. You just build a backup system. Surely management understands that redundancy is good. Then, when the crappy one breaks, you can swap it out instantly. That way, you don't have to mess with things prematurely, but you're only down for hopefully a few minutes. (Of course, replacing it "intentionally", before it fails, is more reliable, but keeping a backup system is a viable alternative if nobody wants to touch the working system.)