Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Selling Fax Machines in 2010? (Score 2, Interesting) 443

This is entirely the wrong approach, and an act that demonstrates unwillingness to change, much like what we've seen in certain other parts of the entertainment industry. But seriously, if you owned and operated a shop selling music, would you be scared of iTunes and the likes, your only real choices would be to evolve and give better service than them, or just close up shop, the choice of abolishing internet music isnt really up there on the list of sane choices, atleast it didnt use to be. What if you sold horses when cars first became available, would you try to abolish cars altogether, or perhaps change your business into something that fits the market thats coming? Or what if you suddenly found that you'd been selling fax machines well beyond their obsoletion? Would you rage out and try to abolish the internet, or perhaps just realize that you should try to save the scraps, and turn your shop into selling something that people actually buy? Trying to force the market to do something can be tricky...

Comment Re:The Correct Way(TM) (Score 1) 702

I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.

Well, as far as I can see, the 6/21-rationale is only a result of how dates are read in the english language, and not in any other way "The Right Way", is it more rational to have your dates MM/DD/YYYY, than to have them DD/MM/YYYY, the first one is middle-endian and really weird, while the second one is a little-endian approach, that appreciates the fact that the month and year part to an increasing degree might be implicated.

I agree on YYYY/MM/DD being practical for sorting purposes, but DD/MM/YYYY is just as practical for reading fast. If you have YYYY/MM/DD, you'll have to read either right-to-left, or make some small mental adjustments for the order. When is knowing the year more important than the date of something? Mostly in historical discussions, where the date is often less important than the year (and in many cases, the year might be the best known part of a historical date), but with current events, the first thing you'd like to know, is the date (or perhaps the month if the timescale is a bit bigger), then the month, and then whether it will happen in the far future (some other year), or just simply this year.

What it comes down to for me, is that MM/DD/YYYY is a weird NUXI, somewhat of an abomination in the concept of writing down dates, either use little-endian dates, or big-endian dates. Quite a few languages even appreciate this, and pronounce dates DD/MM/YYYY. As an example, norwegians say "21. Juli 2010".

The argument for MM/DD becomes even worse when looking at how the clock is read, "Quarter Past Three", would imply writing time MM:HH, which is quite in line with writing little-endian dates...

Windows

British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows 725

meist3r writes "On his Government blog, Microsoft's Ian McKenzie announced today that the Royal Navy was ahead of schedule for switching their nuclear submarines to a customized Microsoft Windows solution dubbed 'Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG)' which apparently consists of Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations. In the article, it is claimed that this decision will save UK taxpayers £22m over the next ten years. The installation of the new system apparently took just 18 days on the HMS Vigilant. According to the BAE Systems press release from 2005, the overall cost of the rollout was £24.5m for all eleven nuclear submarines of the Vanguard, Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes. Talk about staying with the sinking ship."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle 423

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"
Media

Linux Now an Equal Flash Player 437

nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.
Programming

6 Languages You Wish the Boss Let You Use 264

Esther Schindler writes "Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. However, it was a fair point. While CIO has covered several in depth, those five dynamic languages are not the only ones developers use. In 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use, CIO looks at several (including Groovy, Scala, Lua, F#, Clojure and Boo) which deserve more attention for business software development, even if your shop is dedicated to Java or .NET. Each language gets a formal definition and then a quote or two from a developer who explains why it inspires passion."
Privacy

Questionable Data Mining Concerns IRC Community 306

jessekeys writes "Two days ago an article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK revealed to the community that a service logs conversations of public IRC channels and put them into a public searchable database. What is especially shocking for the community is that the logging bots are very hard to identify. They have human-like nicks, connect via anonymous Tor nodes and authenticate as mIRC clients. IRSeeK never asked for permission and violates the privacy terms of networks and users. A lot of chatters were deeply disturbed finding themselves on the search engine in logs which could date back to 2005. As a result, Freenode, the largest FOSS IRC network in existence, immediately banned all tor connections while the community gathered and set up a public wiki page to share knowledge and news about IRSeeK. The demands are clear: remove all existing logs and stop covert operations in our channels and networks. Right now, the IRSeeK search is unavailable as there are talks talking place with Freenode Staff."

Slashdot Top Deals

If this is timesharing, give me my share right now.

Working...