Evacuate cities?

People need to get out of buildings and away from things that can fall on them when there's a major earthquake.

Here most people die when they're crushed under concrete and other building materials (stone, bricks, etc.) in poorly constructed homes.

Something that says an earthquake is imminent would definitely help.

Would you tell us what hardware you use for the CPU, RAM (how many sticks), disks, and power supply?

60W for all that seems incredible!

GIMP doesn't use Guile. It currently uses an embedded fork of Tinyscheme, which is somewhere between R4RS and R5RS compliant, and somewhat not.

Some people like Scheme (it is well suited to represent order of graphics operations), and some hate it. That's why GIMP supports Python and C too for extending.

I guess that sums up what other apps can do. You don't have to stick with "an" extension language when you can support many.

Fabrice is also the reason for Qemu, FFmpeg and LZEXE.

I hope he has a lot of kids :)

It's not all about top-notch brains. It's also about many not-so-clever brains at lesser salary. This was the reason why US companies hired foreign labor, and this is the reason why thanks to the H1B caps, companies are happy to go east to other countries.

Most CEOs (especially American CEOs) don't care about how well it will be for the company 10 years down the line. They care about the next quarter.

More and more jobs are global now in computer science. If there is a programming job, it can be had anywhere in this world, not just in America.

Plus, isn't America so well off thanks to migrants? Who invented your rockets and your bombs near in the past as 50 years ago? Who makes your microprocessors? Suddenly, you want to stop immigration and be protectionist?

This professor needs to stop dining and think a little.

OTOH, there's the big problem of Indian companies gobbling up H1B slots like it was property.. but that's a different problem. There's also the problem of poor quality labour --- programmers who can't code, thanks to sneaky HRs and those who undercut salary, fire the good programmers and hire the cheap ones. It looks good this quarter, but they'll soon find out. Again, this has nothing to do with migration.

Here, we have Biotech, Commerce students recruited into the CS industry. "Don't worry we'll train you in 4 weeks."

Why? Because we can sell this to the western company whose CEO is more than eager to pick up this plate because it's cheaper.

Imagine if a CS worker were hired in an airline as a pilot (Don't worry we'll train you in 4 weeks), or *shudder* as a surgeon. Quality programming is harder and needs more experience than all this.

In the end, the Indian programmers who actually studied CS and are good at what they do get a bad name on Slashdot and elsewhere, cause they're a part of the lot.

I had always loved Slashdot, but is there any alternative community run site without the Slashvertisements?

... from this. Good old inverter with lead-acid batteries.

Using Firefox + Adblock Plus + NoScript:

No. Time Source Destination Protocol Info
          27 3.918190 10.4.12.92 216.34.181.48 HTTP GET /story/11/01/24/1657252/Mozilla-Proposes-Do-Not-Track-HTTP-Header HTTP/1.1

Frame 27 (582 bytes on wire, 582 bytes captured)
Linux cooked capture
Internet Protocol, Src: 10.4.12.92 (10.4.12.92), Dst: 216.34.181.48 (216.34.181.48)
Transmission Control Protocol, Src Port: 34619 (34619), Dst Port: http (80), Seq: 1, Ack: 1, Len: 514
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
        GET /story/11/01/24/1657252/Mozilla-Proposes-Do-Not-Track-HTTP-Header HTTP/1.1\r\n
        Host: tech.slashdot.org\r\n
        User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Fedora Firefox/3.6.12\r\n
        Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8\r\n
        Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5\r\n
        Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate\r\n
        Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7\r\n
        Keep-Alive: 115\r\n
        X-Do-Not-Track: 1\r\n
        Referer: http://slashdot.org/\r\n
        Connection: keep-alive\r\n
        Cache-Control: max-age=0\r\n
        \r\n

Oh and Slashdot, how the heck am I supposed to post on your system when I'm behind my ISP's NAT and someone else has already beat me to it?

I did not know that. We run a company website, so this should not be a problem. However, we do run public forums. I wonder how _anyone_ can enforce any rules about posting in a forum. Even if you were to delete offending posts, there is still the time between when it was posted and when it was deleted. If they are policing, I hope they do it with a large grain of salt. This restriction about ordinary porn is very weird though. Is there something in German laws which disallows it?

Not sure. I live in India, so most of the internet has worse latency than that. Germany is closer as long as we don't get routed through Singapore and the Pacific, kinda like touching your nose around your head. :) However, 120ms is not something I'd call bad for ordinary use. We use interactive SSH shells from here, and it feels good. If you are running something time sensitive like stock trading, maybe then you'd need something closer.

Apologies for the delay in replying.

They run their own datacenters in Germany. Check their website for details.

Banu is a company. We serve the main HTTPS website, DNS, email, XMPP chat, mailman lists, bugzilla, git repositories, rsync for /pub, run virtual machines for builds, run other bits like IRC bots, bittorrent tracker + seed for large files, shells for people, etc. We are also working on a shop section.

Granted some of these can be done using free services on the net, but:

1. We lose identity by distributing things all around the net instead of handling our own infrastructure.

2. There would be a lack of absolute privacy for emails, private repositories, customer data, etc. This is very relevant now that we are launching a shop website.

3. Free services on the net tend to go away without a prior notice period to transition things.

4. The shared hosting scenario is not much different given the services that we run. It would need a beefy shared setup, and there'd always be restrictions compared to running your own server.

What we have now is well worth the money.

In reply to my own comment, I sound like a shill.. I wish I could delete the parent comment.

I pay Hetzner ;) and they have done well to be appreciated. Websites I host on this box include banu.com and mukund.org.

I used to host with ThePlanet for my websites. Though their services were pretty stable, they charge so much that I looked for other vendors after a couple of years. Switched this year to Hetzner.de. They provide a dedicated server for 49 EUR that gives me i7-920 quad core, 8 GB of RAM, 2 * 750 GB of disk space and 5 TB of bandwidth per month. Plus they have a great web-based system for remote rescue, reboots, and all services that run on the machine are now available on native IPv6. I haven't had any hiccups so far, and it seems well worth the money.

Their support staff seem to struggle a little bit with English, but their web-based rescue interface leaves little to ask the service staff about.

Oracle dismissing LibreOffice folks is pretty much what anyone else would do in their shoes. Let's say you have a project X. Some people with relatively less power in your project fork it to project Y, and say they do it because project X sucks. What would you do? Still keep them in project X? Replace X with an organization you head, and this will make more sense. This is the definition of conflict of interest, and the outcome is exactly what happens in such a case.

How about sending some targeted "Hello world" transmissions towards that object first? If they have any intelligent life and a SETI program in place, they may hear us and answer back.