Comment: Total Perspective Vortex (Score 2) 405
"The most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected:" The Total Perspective Vortex
+ - Student publishes extensive statistics on the population of Middle-Earth->
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by
dsjodin
dsjodin writes "There are only 19% females in Tolkien's works and the life expectancy of a Hobbit is 96.24 years. In January 2012 chemical engineering student Emil Johansson published a website with the hope for it to become a complete Middle-Earth genealogy. Now, ten months later, he has published some interesting numbers derived from the database of 923 characters. The site features a set of unique graphs helping us understand the world Tolkien described. Perhaps the most interesting ones are showing the decrease of the longevity of Men and the change in population of Middle-Earth throughout history. The latter was also recently published in the September edition of Wired Magazine."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
+ - How can I succeed as a small developer in the patent war era?->
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by
hovelander
hovelander writes ""For three decades, Mr. Phillips had focused on writing software to allow computers to understand human speech. In 2006, he had co-founded a voice recognition company, and eventually executives at Apple, Google and elsewhere proposed partnerships. Mr. Phillips’s technology was even integrated into Siri itself before the digital assistant was absorbed into the iPhone. But in 2008, Mr. Phillips’s company, Vlingo, had been contacted by a much larger voice recognition firm called Nuance. “I have patents that can prevent you from practicing in this market,” Nuance’s chief executive, Paul Ricci"
I don't have the money yet to retain a patent monkey, sorry lawyer, and don't wish to live in the movie "Brazil"! What are some pragmatic options?"
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I don't have the money yet to retain a patent monkey, sorry lawyer, and don't wish to live in the movie "Brazil"! What are some pragmatic options?"
Link to Original Source
+ - The Limits of Open Source->
Submitted
by
Kailden
Kailden writes "Wall Street pundits misleading investors is not a news story. Neither is their unceasing ability to muddle and doubt technology. The Street contends that open-source is limited due to the fact that although it increases competition and can cause companies to stumble, it will never dominate. Are they right?"
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Link to Original Source
Comment: directories (Score 1) 629
I think I understand the difference between /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, and ~/bin as far as installing applications, but then I get the programs that insist on /opt/bin, or even /var/opt.
On my desktop system, for the things I'm not compiling from source that demand /opt, I've redirected them to /usr/local. Have I committed a great philosophical error, oh wise ones?
On my desktop system, for the things I'm not compiling from source that demand