this is one of the best pieces of satire that i’ve read. unfortunately, there’s way too much truth in this to be funny. with all this hoo-haa behind GTA IV, things look pretty grim from the morality police headed by the hillary clintons and the uk govt’s of the world. yeah, it’s always about protecting “the children”, which leads me to wonder where “the parents” are, and if these people are so serious about making the world better for the children, why they don’t invest the same amount of energy and resources into securing quality healthcare and world-class education for them as they spend wringing their hands over video games that aren’t even supposed to be played by the children in the first place.
so this guy sits his girlfriend down and gives her a brand new ubuntu machine to use. she’s a complete windows user who has never used linux before. and then he gives her a few tasks to do such as burning and downloading a music album, photoshopping images, changing OS themes, drawing pictures and saving it in different formats, and launching things like her MSN profile.
the results are interesting. i don’t agree too much with a lot of his conclusions but the way the user decided to go about doing things makes for a good read. tost how’s your conversion been with you and omair?
this is a fascinating lecture about fifteen minutes long from professor clay shirky from nyu on how the switch from the 19th to 20th century came about with the advancement of the industrial revolution and how it is analagous today with the way various online media are taking over the cognitive surplus which has allowed people to waste their time on television. it really is worth watching and you’ll only be a better person after having watched it.
a few weeks ago mozilla celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary. now that to me personally isn’t as exciting as the way they celebrated. their co-founder recreated the mosaic communications corporation home page from it’s 1994 glory, and even better still, they have all their vintage product archive hanging around.
“If people think of computing as going to a PC, sitting down and starting Word, then the traditional view, of using Windows and Office, will persist.
“But if people think of their daily experience as a sit down on the web, we know that people can have a very compelling experience on Linux.
“In fact, we know it is a better web experience because they can do it without spyware, without viruses.”
Mr Shuttleworth said he believed there were about eight to nine million users of Ubuntu worldwide.
He said the French police force was currently deploying 50,000 Ubuntu-powered machines, while Spanish education authorities were rolling out 500,000 desktops with the OS.
There’s no culture of piracy in the Linux community.
Southern Californians, get ready for higher home insurance. The US Geological Survey has just released its first ever statewide earthquake forecast for California, and the odds aren’t great. The study finds a 99.7% chance that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater will hit California by 2037, while the probability of a quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater is 46%.
So it’s that time of year again when I get to whore Ubuntu to the limited number of readers I have on this blog. Seems like a lot of fancy new features in this release. My favourite feature which is going to be a lot easier convincing people to convert from Windows to Ubuntu is this one. Hopefully people give this a shot and try it out. I haven’t tried the beta yet, but am quietly waiting for the final release to upgrade. Am rather excited. My previous posts and discussions on Ubuntu and peoples conversion stories can be found here.
If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it’s that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can’t ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue.
Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.
You can now download a beta of Ubuntu’s 8.04 release, more commonly and affectionately known as Hardy Heron (the follow-up to Gutsy Gibbon and Feisty Fawn). Final release is set for April 24.
Finding the Higgs-Boson is the imperative of the two most powerful particle accelerators ever built—the Tevatron at Fermilab, now reaching the peak of its decades-long performance, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where beams will circulate for the first time around a 27-km track within the next few months. The Higgs has not yet been discovered, but at this week*s meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in St. Louis dozens of talks referred to the status of the Higgs search. Why is the Higgs so important? Because it is thought to pervade the universal vacuum; not, as with the old aether, to provide a material substrate for the propagation of electromagnetic waves, but rather to interact with particles and confer mass upon them. The Higgs* ministrations are usually hidden away in the vacuum, but if enough energy is brought to bear in a tiny volume of space—at the point where two energetic particles collide—then the Higgs can be turned into an actual particle whose existence can be detected. Theoretical calculations made using the standard model of particle physics combined with previous experiments serve to limit the possible range of masses for the Higgs particle. Right now that mass is thought to be larger than 114 GeV but smaller than about 190 GeV.
The Tevatron delivers more than enough energy to create a particle in that energy range. The main issue, then, is luminosity, or the density of beam particles crashed together per second. The Tevatron recently established a record high luminosity: 3.1 x 10^32 per cm^2 per second.
That’s what a Higgs would event look like? One speaker at the meeting, Brian Winer (Ohio State), said that the *most Higgs-like Higgs event* seen so far was on in which (it is surmised) the proton-antiproton collision at the Tevatron had created a fireball which then decayed into a W boson (one of the carriers of the weak nuclear force) and a Higgs particle. The Higgs in turn quickly decayed into a bottom-antibottom quark pair whose combined mass amounted to 120 GeV. By itself such an event does not constitute a discovery. Successfully observing the Higgs involves finding an inventory of candidate events substantially larger than the number of expected background events from collisions which to not produce a Higgs particle but which mimic some features of the Higgs. Time (and luminosity) will tell whether the Tevatron accumulates enough Higgs candidate events to establish a statistically-satisfactory *discovery.* One Tevatron physicist, Dmitri Denisov (denisovd@fnal.gov) summarized the likely status of things when the experiments (the CDF and D0 detector groups) start to wrap up in the year 2010. The luminosity, he said, would probably be twice what it is now and that 4 to 8 times more data would be analyzed than is available today.
The Higgs, if it exists, is expected to show up in abundance at the LHC, where the collision energy is much higher than at the Tevatron. Abraham Seiden (abs@scipp.ucsc.edu) of UC Santa Cruz summarized the current status of the LHC. In the CERN lab scientists and engineers are now chilling down the magnets which steer protons around their proper trajectory to the near-absolute-zero temperatures needed for operating in a superconducting mode. Although designed to produce proton beams at 7 TeV, the accelerator will at first hold to a more conservative 5 TeV. As for the present schedule, Seiden quoted a recent CERN report specifying mid June as th e time when the machine would be cooled and ready to circulate beams around the ring and August as the time when actual particle collisions will commence. However, several scientists at the meeting, when asked, were somewhat skeptical that this timeline would be met.
As for the prospective scenario for discoveries at LHC in coming years, Seiden said that finding evidence for a supersymmetric particle (one of a large family of hypothetical particles) might be possible as early as the year 2009, while finding the Higgs might be possible by 2010.
so i got a question about the postal service which has been bugging me for a while. any of you know how it works, do let me know.
suppose i mail a letter from toronto to karachi. i pay the postage here, so who pays for all the cost of the letter after it leaves canada, the route to get to pakistan, and delivery after it reaches pakistan? i doubt my postage will cover the entire cost of the journey nor will the recieving party see much of it, but they end up delivering it regardless.
No… its not a swear word or a medical condition - though the latter could be debated …. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”) to the Twitter website.
The point of it? Please feel free to enlighten me…
Portishead’s debut album, “Dummy,” sold 1.1 million copies and its second, “Portishead,” sold 635,000. Then, after touring and a live follow-up album, Portishead faded out.
Now Portishead has rematerialized, resuming a career that has always moved in slow motion. “It’s amazing how quickly 10 years can go,” said Adrian Utley, who plays guitars and keyboards, over coffee at an elegant Munich hotel the night before the band’s performance. “There was no sense that we would split up or we weren’t going to do anything again. We just didn’t want to for that time.”
Reduced exercise, the adoption of western foods and an aging population have made Japanese men about 10 percent heavier than they were 30 years ago, ministry statistics show. Women are 6.4 percent fatter.
The ministry estimates that half of men over age 40 and 20 percent of women will be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome. For men, a key yardstick is whether they have a waistline wider than 85 centimeters (33.5 inches). Body mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and smoking will also be taken into account.
Since the beginning of the year I have been keeping all of my garbage and recycling in my basement.
What do you do with everything? Right now everything is going in the basement. Each day I tally up what waste I created for the day, what it was (to the best of my abilities anyway) and what is going to happen to it (garbage, recycling, etc.) and then it goes in the appropriate place downstairs.
Hi honey - I was thinking lets email all day today and call each other the next day………………or if you get the urge or I do I or you will call………hey listen I rec’d in the mail a 15% all day shopping pass in the mail today for Macy’s. I believe you can pick any day you want to use it. I will let you know……….. I know you do not want any more cards but I would cancel Bloomingdale’s and get the Macys….. they always have great sales………..all the time and when you move back to NYC you can use it all the time …………macys is so much less expensive and you save a lot where at Bloomies you do not and just think of Miracle on 34th street…………..just a thought. Okay honey have a great day and I LOVE YOU.
What? You don’t know about the Red Shirt Phenomenon? Well, as any die-hard Trekkie knows, if you are wearing a red shirt and beam to the planet with Captain Kirk, you’re gonna die. That’s the common thinking, but I decided to put this to the test. After all, I hadn’t seen any definitive proof; it’s just what people said.
Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:
Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)
So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.
However, that’s only just simple stats reporting - ready for some analysis?
In-depth Analysis:
Analysis involves asking questions about the data. Analysis attempts to bring reason and cause to the reported data in order to find why something is happening. With that data, one can improve the situation based on the intelligence gained from the analysis.
yay. someone left me a new comment on my serious poll. it’s still active in case anyone is wondering. and people are still looking it up and going to it. if you haven’t seen it before then here you go, a very serious poll for you to fill out. with almost five hundred votes now on the poll, it’s somewhwat a bit more reflective of what a survey should be like. if you haven’t seen it before, link to it and spread the word, let’s try and get everyone’s opinion on it.
The computer-modeling study showed a nuclear war between the two countries involving 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear devices on each side would cause massive urban fires and loft as much as 5 million metric tons of soot about 50 miles into the stratosphere, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Michael Mills, chief study author. The soot would absorb enough solar radiation to heat surrounding gases, setting in motion a series of chemical reactions that would break down the stratospheric ozone layer protecting Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation, said Mills.
“We would see a dramatic drop in ozone levels that would persist for many years,” said Mills of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “At mid- latitudes the ozone decrease would be up to 40 percent, which could have huge effects on human health and on terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems.”
Over the last few days I have received several requests not to participate in the Olympic Torch Relay. Requests through members of my family, personal friends, people who are associated with the Tibetan struggle, and my blog. I have gone through and read each and every letter, message and post pertaining to this issue.
I would like to state that I have the highest regard and respect for the struggle that the people of Tibet are going through. I completely empathize with them. Similarly, I have the highest respect and regard for the struggle that the people of Iraq, Kashmiri Pundits who have been displaced, Kashmiris in general, and the people of Palestine, are going through. I have named above just a few instances of human rights violations. Across the world, and indeed within our own country too, there are several instances and examples of atrocities and human rights violation, which are still continuing. I categorically state that I am absolutely against any form of violence, and certainly I am deeply upset whenever the basic rights of human beings are violated anywhere in the world.
However, I feel that the Olympic Games do not belong to China.
find someone you don’t like with a windows machine and when they’re not looking, do the following on it.
click on start > find > find files or folders
find *.exe, on all local hard drives
it’ll take a few minutes but it should bring back a thousand or so hits after finding all the executables on the hard drive.
select all by ctrl - a and then ctrl - c to copy all, and then ctrl - v or paste it all into Windows startup. (might end having to create a shortcut rather than copy the executable over).
If you really want to be evil, you walk away at this point and the person who’s computer it is will realize what has happened the next time he restarts his machine and will just sit there with his head in his hands. (Nobody ever checks start up). Or you could do it right there and then and watch everything start up in front of you and the owner of the machine wondering why the heck his computer boot time is so ridiculous.
so a bunch of maasai are gonna be running the london marathon this year. but the stuck up brits think that they’re uncouth and ill-mannered so they’ve prepared a guide for them on how to behave. since this isn’t crocodile dundee, they think people won’t find it funny if they stick their spears into goats and cows. i guess they still haven’t learnt anything from embarassing themselves after colonizing the entire world.
“Even though some [Brits] may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people - many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should.“
“You cannot rely on the sun to tell the time accurately and will have to rely on clocks and watches. The sun will rise and set at different times.“
“Whereas at home for you it is acceptable to spit, in England it is not but, if you have to, you must do so in a sink or in some trees when no one is looking.“
“If you see something that someone else has, like a bracelet, and you like it, then the person will find it very unusual if you were to take it and wear it.”
“if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief.“
“You may see these animals in a field, seemingly left alone. It is important to remember that these animals are owned by someone and are being looked after.”
“You will see many people who are wearing only small clothes and you will wonder why they are cold and may think they are being disrespectful. This is normal for England, especially when it is sunny or in the evening. However, it is illegal to show certain parts of the body and for this reason it is important that you wear underpants if you are wearing your blankets.”
“When people drink they [seem] sillier or different.”
i’m assuming everyone has heard about the ban the pcb has placed on shoaib akhtar for five years. he is at the moment appealing in court, but in likelihood, his career with pakistan is pretty much done and over with and i say hi deserves it. but was he ever any value to pakistan is the question.
this cricinfo articles breaks down the numbers of shoaibs history with pakistan and compares them to wasim and waqar. brilliant stuff. be your own judge. what is the opportunity cost of having shoaib akhtar on the team? s. rajesh from cricinfo breaks it down.
April 29th, 2008 by 
abbas
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