Comment Re:calm down chinaphiles... (Score 1) 142
*all ISPs, not all DNS's, that would make sense.
Comment Re:calm down chinaphiles... (Score 1) 142
I've had my ISP's DNS cache occasionally fail to return results, or return an invalid cached result a few times. Doing it for a site as big as Google is embarrassing, but not unheard of.
It's kinda unusual for it to happen blanket across all DNS's at the same instant, following a critical piece of reportage on Google by the government owned television network (which received a 40bn Yuan advertising revenue gift from arch-rival Baidu shortly before the Google critical piece, and shortly after a critical piece on them).
Comment Re:outsourcing and unemployment (Score 2, Insightful) 1144
Perhaps require evidence of participation in an open source project: direct code analysis and track-record of a person's drive and communication. I've used this in the past, it's a great screener (and doesn't require I waste time like you cited above).
Comment Re:Protectionism (Score 1) 106
Hmmm, I find few British people have the same sentiment about the US than Americans have about China. And by your analogy the should be, well, analogous.
Comment Re:Baidu benefits from being Chinese (Score 2, Informative) 106
And sadly it's nothing special. When typing a URL that doesn't resolve on a mainland China ISP a Baidu-sponsored search page (full of ads, no simple search box) appears.
It was only in 2006 when google.com itself was redirected to baidu.com by some ISPs some of the time.
Some of the country (in major cities, forget the countryside) has the facade of development, but with basic corruption endemic at the bottom and top levels, it has a whole lot further to go.
Comment Re:Finally... (Score 1) 505
Happens here too, but 'a while' tends to be after 6 hours of surfing. I'd put a lot of weight on the plugins, mine are Firebug, Flash Player, British English Dictionary, Chinese Pera-kun (that's it). All are essential to my surfing. But having to force a shut down isn't a big hassle, the OS keeps running, and that's fine.
Comment Re:Stay With Me Here (Score 1) 286
With regards to the catch-all email, is there any way to configure something like that, and interface it with GMail?
I have a catch-all forwarding to an a real email account, which I then forward to GMail (and GMail then puts this real email address, pointing to my domain, in the header of send mails). This is really useful behaviour:
- GMail can be configured with rules so any email sent to a certain address (for example, facebook.com@mydomain.com) skips the Inbox and gets auto-tagged via a filter. It's possible to set up a filter on the reply-to field of an email, but when some domains use different reply-to addresses for essentially the same purpose (at least as it seems to me, as the receiver of the email) I find this a better method.
- Finding out who is selling my email address. I use a unique address for each site I register at, so it's easy to see who is being unethical with my email address. This was more important in the late 90s and early 00s, anti-spam has advanced to the level it's more a curiosity factor than a practical matter any more.
- Branding. For a personal domain this is less important, but for a small or one-man business a catch-all forwarding to a single address means an email mis-sent to sales@domainname.com still gets delivered (and spam filtered), and a sale opportunity/enquiry is not missed, and can be replied to from a branded email address (just set up alternate email addresses as reply-to in GMail).
- And of course, using a domain and free GMail means no lock-in (stuck with the same address) of the sort email hosts can impose should they wish (this doesn't apply to catch-all addresses, just personal domains in general, but is the reason I went with a personal domain for email).
I receive around 700 spams per day all filtered correctly (in GMail's 'spam' folder) and around 1 spam per day in my Inbox. The domain is 11 years old. As another poster above pointed out, using a domain and variations on multiple/catch-all addresses also means you have a variety and flexibility in your approach to using email that a single address, especially an address not on a domain you own, doesn't provide.
Submission + - Coffee cookies and RSS (slashdot.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Say!
What's up with requirement to have javascript fully on and cookies accepted, though silently — otherwise: slashdot stories wont load either in or from my favourite rss aggregator [lifera]....?
started near to the end of May 2009
bug or feature?
What's up with requirement to have javascript fully on and cookies accepted, though silently — otherwise: slashdot stories wont load either in or from my favourite rss aggregator [lifera]....?
started near to the end of May 2009
bug or feature?
Comment Re:Duh! No real news here, move along please... (Score 1) 63
I guess if in a salaried environment and 'not nitpicking and actually having something useful to say' were built into a package you'd say something more useful than the above.
Comment Re:LOL (Score 1) 464
There are people in the world who are just boring and unimaginitive... this xkcd comic
People that appreciate/quote/use/follow xkcd... XKCD followers to XKCD are much like mud to a mud-guard.
Submission + - 100M year old microbes found in termite guts (msn.com)
viyh writes: "One hundred million years ago a termite was wounded and its abdomen split open. The resin of a pine tree slowly enveloped its body and the contents of its gut.
In what is now the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the resin fossilized and was buried until it was chipped out of an amber mine. The resin had seeped into the termite's wound and preserved even the microscopic organisms in its gut. These microbes are the forebears of the microbes that live in the guts of today's termites and help them digest wood.
The fossil is the earliest example of a relationship between an animal and the microbes in its gut, a new study shows.
"The chances of finding a termite with its body open like this are rare," said George Poinar, an amber expert at Oregon State University who led the research, published in the latest edition of the journal Parasites and Vectors. The amber preserved the microbes with exquisite detail, including internal features like the nuclei.
"In some of these [microbes] you can actually see wood particles," Poinar told LiveScience."
In what is now the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, the resin fossilized and was buried until it was chipped out of an amber mine. The resin had seeped into the termite's wound and preserved even the microscopic organisms in its gut. These microbes are the forebears of the microbes that live in the guts of today's termites and help them digest wood.
The fossil is the earliest example of a relationship between an animal and the microbes in its gut, a new study shows.
"The chances of finding a termite with its body open like this are rare," said George Poinar, an amber expert at Oregon State University who led the research, published in the latest edition of the journal Parasites and Vectors. The amber preserved the microbes with exquisite detail, including internal features like the nuclei.
"In some of these [microbes] you can actually see wood particles," Poinar told LiveScience."
Submission + - Google Earth Raises Discrimination Issue in Japan 3
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Times reports that by allowing old maps to be overlaid on satellite images of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, Google has unwittingly created a visual tool that has prolonged an ancient discrimination says a lobbying group established to protect the human rights of three million burakumin, members of the sub-class condemned by the old feudal system in Japan to unclean jobs associated with death and dirt. "We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view," says David Rumsey, a US map collector. Throughout the recent history of the burakumin, the central issue has been identification and some Japanese companies actively screen out burakumin-linked job seekers. Because there is nothing physical to differentiate burakumin from other Japanese and because there are no clues in their names or accent, the only way of establishing whether or not they are burakumin is by tracing their family. By publishing the locations of burakumin ghettos with the modern street map, the illegal quest to trace ancestry is made easier, says Toru Matsuoka, an opposition MP and member of the Buraku Liberation League. Under pressure to diffuse criticism, Google has asked the owners of the woodblock print maps to remove the legend that identifies the ghetto with an old term that translates loosely as "scum town". "We had not acknowledged the seriousness of the map, but we do take this matter seriously," says Yoshito Funabashi, a Google spokesman."
Submission + - What made those old, 2D platformers so great? (significant-bits.com) 1
TheManagement writes: "Many current developers of web games seem to have a fondness for 2D platformers. However, their desire to capture what made Sonic and Mario games so great is rarely achieved. In attempt to breach that gap, Significant Bits takes a look at three common design principles that made those classic titles so enjoyable."
Submission + - Students required to buy iPhones 2
Norsefire writes: "New incoming freshmen at the University of Missouri School of Journalism are being required to purchase iPhones to enable them to download lectures and to check facts on the internet while reporting from a news scene. After complaints, the school explained that it is requiring "web-enabled, audio-video player" devices, but while Blackberrys and Zunes are acceptable they are "not preferred"."
Comment Re:Wow... (Score 1) 629
I believe we should look at these diagrams to truly understand blocking of intersections. Link: http://is.gd/ovSB
