Comment Re:What's good for the goose.... (Score 4, Insightful) 421
How about the government can have as much privacy as it's citizens.
I think a government should have far _less_ privacy than it's citizens.
Comment Much better launch video by NASA (Score 2) 63
Comment Re:You don't call a JPEG a "Jay-/f/eg" (Score 1) 155
What about GIMP, then?
Comment Re:Coconut juice is not milk and never was (Score 1) 520
Margarine is (sometimes) a butter substitute but we don't call it butter.
What about peanut butter?
Comment Link to the course (Score 1) 402
Here is the link to the actual course.
Comment Re:UK costs will numerically match those of the US (Score 1) 84
Apps on the app store come in different "price tiers" from free, to $0.99, to $1.99 etc. Apple translates these prices for countries other than the USA. Mostly this is done by multiplying or dividing by the exchange rate, adding VAT where necessary, and rounding to a nice even amount (if they calculated the correct price should be £2.04 or £1.94, then the actual price will be £1.99, for example).
In what plane of existence is 1.99 "a nice even amount"?
Submission + - Debian 6.0 Released (debian.org)
Tubal-Cain writes: The Debian Project has announced the release of version 6.0 (codenamed "Squeeze") of their popular operating system. This version, the first first since they adopted a release schedule a year and a half ago, features KDE 4.4.5, Gnome 2.30, X.org 2.7, and the Linux 2.6.32 kernel. They are also introducing a port to a FreeBSD kernel on x86 and x86_64 platforms. Accompanying this new version is an updated layout for their websites, bringing a bit of consitency between their home page, wiki, package search, etc.
Comment Asimov comes to mind (Score 1) 1
Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice."
Asimov has written several stories with a similar theme. People discovering ancient practices rendered obsolete by new technology.
Submission + - How Well Will Linux Handle Future Multicores? (mit.edu)
eldavojohn writes: Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign.
Submission + - Wikipedia is offline
An anonymous reader writes: It appears as though wikipedia.org is offline. Just as it did on the 24th of March, it seems to have blinked out of existence. As a direct result, all of human kind is now slightly dumber.
Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149
krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."
Comment F6, F10, Print, ScrollLock, Menu (Score 1) 939
In that order, based on my usage pattern for the last 18 months.
The most used keys were Enter, Space, Tab, A
Comment Re:Corporate crimes (Score 1) 171
Since this is a free and open source tool, it should be possible to save a copy of the key as well as the scrambled message as soon as it is received, so that it can be decrypted at any later time.
It is explicitly mentioned in the article that the aim of this is not to prevent the recipient from saving a copy. It is to prevent decryption at the lots of other places where it might be cached since the key is destroyed after a short while.
Comment Re:malware (Score 3, Informative) 362
Comment Re:Options (Score 1) 315
Extending your logic, there should be exactly zero votes for:
No answer at all; I refuse to vote.
:-)
