mopomi - Slashdot User

Submission + - Call To Halt Donations To Stop Wikipedia Deletions 4

Submitted by

ObsessiveMathsFreak

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @09:04PM

ObsessiveMathsFreak writes: "Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser, in protest at the "notability purges" taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening? Is Deletionism becoming a dominant ethos on Wikipedia? Are the right people holding the reigns?"

Submission + - MIT's SAT Math Error

Submitted by

theodp

on Sunday September 23, 2007 @06:28PM

theodp writes: "The Wall Street Journal reports that for years now, MIT wasn't properly calculating the average freshmen SAT scores (reg.) used to determine U.S. News & World Report's influential annual rankings. In response to an inquiry made by The Tech regarding the school's recent drop in the rankings, MIT revealed that in past years it had excluded the test scores of foreign students as well as those who fared better on the ACT than the SAT, both violations of the U.S. News rules. MIT's reported first-quartile SAT verbal and math scores for the 2006 incoming class totaled 1380, a drop of 50 points from 2005."

Submission + - How many files does a modern OS really need? 2

Submitted by mopomi on Monday July 30, 2007 @01:47PM

mopomi writes: I'm setting up a home-office for my SO. Part of the company's requirement for the home-office is that the computer have an anti-virus package installed (because it will be connected directly to their network via a VPN). Since we don't like to use Windows for day-to-day work, we're running the VPN and remote display software under Suse 10.1. To be technically compliant with the AV requirement, I found and installed software from a big-name AV vendor (company is irrelevant). Last night I ran the AV scan on the entire system (bar /proc and /dev). This includes the Windows XP partition that is used for gaming.

The software scanned nearly three million files (with no positives!). My (somewhat rhetorical) question: Why are there so many files on modern operating systems? is every file necessary? is every tenth? how much of this is cruft?

Slashdot Top Deals