Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Why doesn't he discuss the merits of SaaS? (Score 0) 319

by w1z7ard (#44986275) Attached to: RMS On Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before

I very much agree that SaaS is yet another strategic approach to controlling information and the software used to gather it. But it's hard to completely throw away such a useful abstraction. From a pragmatic view, SaaS is a convenient separation of concerns applied to both infrastructure and software.

Perhaps I missed it, but does RMS actually supply a solution to problems solved by SaaS? I noticed a few already in the threads here, but this basically characterizes most choices:

1. A completely decentralized approach, where everyone shares the software and information equally.

2. Every SaaS must run and share opensource code, as well as somehow opening sourcing the content (safely) as well.

3. Assume the worst about all endpoints, eventually empirically and/or contractually trust certain ones in a white list.

Comment caffeine preferences, order by intensity (Score 1) 283

by w1z7ard (#42918065) Attached to: I Get Most of My Caffeine Through
In ascending order of caffeine intensity, here are my preferences.

Green Ice Tea
Black Ice Tea
Iced Yerba Mate
Iced Coffee (cold brewed, to reduce toxicity)
Iced Red Eye (coffee with 1 shot of espresso) **** my personal favorite.
Iced Black Eye (coffee with 2 shots of espresso)

Iced Black Eye's puts me in a jittery state but sometimes I order them for the flavor. I once ordered this drink with a black eye before...it was awkward.

Comment TCP Fast Open (Score 4, Interesting) 143

by w1z7ard (#41513699) Attached to: Linux 3.6 Released
Sounds like a great feature! From the article:

"Fast Open could result in speed improvements of between 4% and 41% in the page load times on popular web sites. In this version only the client-side has been merged."

Comment Slashdot business model? (Score 1) 608

by w1z7ard (#34574734) Attached to: Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already?
Advertisements on the web may be the most common way to turn a profit online, but it's certainly not the universe anyone really wanted except for advertising firms. I would gladly pay $5 a month for wikipedia to exist without ads. In fact, I would almost always pay money rather than see ads for any service (as I eventually did on slashdot, incidentally). So perhaps wikipedia should adopt the slashdot model: No ads for special or paying members- everyone else gets non intrusive ads (by special, I mean long term members, frequent contributors, etc.). You could even adopt a system where contributors get "points" which allow them to not see ads.
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Gamer Plays Doom For the First Time 362

Posted by Soulskill from the new-is-relative dept.
sfraggle writes "Kotaku has an interesting review of Doom (the original!) by Stephen Totilo, a gamer and FPS player who, until a few days ago, had gone through the game's 17-year history without playing it. He describes some of his first impressions, the surprises that he encountered, and how the game compares to modern FPSes. Quoting: 'Virtual shotgun armed, I was finally going to play Doom for real. A second later, I understood the allure the video game weapon has had. In Doom the shotgun feels mighty, at least partially I believe because they make first-timers like me wait for it. The creators make us sweat until we have it in hand. But once we have the shotgun, its big shots and its slow, fetishized reload are the floored-accelerator-pedal stuff of macho fantasy. The shotgun is, in all senses, instant puberty, which is to say, delicately, that to obtain it is to have the assumed added potency that a boy believes a man possesses vis a vis a world on which he'd like to have some impact. The shotgun is the punch in the face the once-scrawny boy on the beach gives the bully when he returns a muscled linebacker.'"
Sci-Fi

Churchill Accused of Sealing UFO Files, Fearing Public Panic 615

Posted by samzenpus from the truth-is-out-there-in-that-filing-cabinet dept.
Newly released secret files show that Winston Churchill ordered a cover-up of an alleged encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public panic. From the article: "Mr Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following: 'This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church.'"
Space

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-look-directly-into-the-quasar dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."

Slashdot Top Deals

This file will self-destruct in five minutes.

Close