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Don't blink. Don't even blink.
Blink and you're dead.

That reminds me of SCP-173.

(It is actually a Dr. Who reference.)

And while I'm confirming my hand-waving stupidity, I'd like to cite http://cubesat.wikidot.com/opticalflux, which has a quick calculation showing on the order of 2.55453 x 1020 photons.s-1.m-2, so when I cleverly said 'less than a trillionth of that amount', you should read 'less than 1^1020th' of that amount instead.

Fortunately for me, 1^1020 is more than a trillionth, so dividing it out would result in 1/1^1020, which is less than a trillionth. So it kind of works out.

This entire letter is crap and just to make Apple try to look good for its actions.

From the open letter:

Jobs says thats Adobe isn't open, then states MANY times in the letter that every video should be done in h.264 that they support. They fail to mention the fact the h.264 isn't open, it's a standard, not an open standard. Not to mention, the whole system for iPhone and iPad isn't open since to use after market software for the devices you need to either buy it from their App Store or pay another $100 for that option. This isn't open, in fact it's more closed then Flash is.

The second 'fact' he tries is claiming that 75% of video is in Flash and should be using something more modern like h.264. He refuses to mention at the point that hey, Flash does do this modern codec of h.264 which invalidates his claim here. Flash is a container, not a codec.

Third thing he tries to claim is Flash is bad for reliability, security and performance. Jobs as always forgets that OSX isn't noted for its high level of security 1 2 and averages around 6 months to pass on a patch, not even to patch it but just to bother to pass it on even though someone else did the work for them. Jobs then goes on claiming that "We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems' yet again 'forgets' that they hurt Adobe before when they switched from the PowerPC chip to x86 chips causing Adobe to lose money and waste time fixing up Adobe products and not having been kept in the loop (which would have prevented the issues). Same thing happened with 10.6 causing more issues for Adobe products that could have been prevented if Apple had just warned Adobe before hand instead of catching Adobe with their pants down. As a company of Adobe's size it would be harder and harder to want to support Apple, which have screwed them over before (not just once), and all to please 6% of the computer market? Thats not much.

Forth is battery life. And here he pulls a switch around, claims that Flash is bad for the battery life by claiming that most Flash videos aren't encoded in the modern codec of h.264. Here he forgets that other videos online are also not encoded in h.264 but formats like Windows Media Video, XviD, DivX and even Apple's own Quicktime format. He also forgets that Flash videos can be encoded in h.264 because at the time of the iPhone being released, Google just decided, with Apples help, to support h.264. Just in time for the iPhone, but was the only one to support it, the other sites came later. This change took time and help from the inside (remember Apple and Google worked together a lot back then before they started to drift apart).

Fifth 'point' is he claims that sites with Flash will have to be re-written to support touch interfaces. And yes they will, and most places will do that if they feel that the public at large wants that. Same happened with web pages. Web sites had to be re-written to 'support' smartphones since they were horrible on the smaller screen sizes and so those sites that deemed it a good move did just that, they re-wrote their pages to support the newer style of accessing the site. Not every site bothered though and same would happen with Flash sites. Jobs seems to feel that sites should have already been made to support touch devices before there was a need as his 'proof'.

Last 'point' is a mishmash of garbage, first re-claiming about how Flash isn't supported with touch in mind (yet it's on touch screen tablet pc's) then goes on to claiming that 'developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third part

For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.

It might work for some games like Mario; but even in the relatively simple genre of 2D scrollers there are some examples of where it wouldn't work, take Braid for example.

I'm not so sure I agree with you. I usually don't agree with people who oversell AI but I'm going to have to claim that Braid could be coded to generate levels -- albeit a bland start you could start to think of the kinds of interleaved time relative solutions necessary on each level and mimic them in your procedural content generation to vary them and even combine them randomly.

Difficult? Yes. Impossible? I don't think so.

IEEE is smart for picking this as an AI competition. All other famous AI (like beating The Turing Test or video analysis) is so very hard and computationally expensive. A competition involving them would be nothing more than babies crawling. So why not do something more hands on and pragmatic?

If you can stomach ads, here's a decent list of games that use procedurally derived content. Check out Eufloria where the music, art and levels are all procedurally generated. I think that has a free demo on Steam. While the PCG wiki isn't the greatest, it's a good starting point if you want to get into this IEEE thing.

For some games randomly generated levels work, but for a lot of games it just means un-inspired bland levels most of the time.

It might work for some games like Mario; but even in the relatively simple genre of 2D scrollers there are some examples of where it wouldn't work, take Braid for example.

I'm not so sure I agree with you. I usually don't agree with people who oversell AI but I'm going to have to claim that Braid could be coded to generate levels -- albeit a bland start you could start to think of the kinds of interleaved time relative solutions necessary on each level and mimic them in your procedural content generation to vary them and even combine them randomly.

Difficult? Yes. Impossible? I don't think so.

IEEE is smart for picking this as an AI competition. All other famous AI (like beating The Turing Test or video analysis) is so very hard and computationally expensive. A competition involving them would be nothing more than babies crawling. So why not do something more hands on and pragmatic?

If you can stomach ads, here's a decent list of games that use procedurally derived content. Check out Eufloria where the music, art and levels are all procedurally generated. I think that has a free demo on Steam. While the PCG wiki isn't the greatest, it's a good starting point if you want to get into this IEEE thing.

According to Negentropism, the devil is entropy.

Another useful "advanced" plugin is LiquidRescale:

http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/

It implements seam carving. It's not yet available as an Ubuntu package, but hopefully someone will package it up.

I'm not into graphics much, but this seems similar to what Liquid Rescale can do.

http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/en:examples

At the 3:45 mark in the first video they show removing elements.

Welcome my "catching up to GIMP from 2007" overlords at Adobe: http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/

Sorry wikidot, I hope you have Slashdotation Insurance (or is that included in the new health shindig?)

Indeed. There is even an active scientific research project that's trying to figure out how Cuil achieves such a unique level of search result accuracy.~

Here we go again: http://noooxml.wikidot.com/

"Committee stuffing is a standard practice for Microsoft. Microsoft raped ISO with their office file formats, leaving the organization in limbo. The whole campaign against the format have raised an army of people, which are furious about the dirty tactics used by Microsoft to get the broken standard through ISO. This anger won't go away, and I wish good luck to Microsoft to get it adopted by governments. The reputation of Microsoft went down below zero with this process."

The SVG Working Group is composed of . . . well, it seems to be "query failed" right now. But anyway, each organization gets one vote. It's made up of Microsoft's competitors. Microsoft cannot stuff the committee, it's not possible within W3C procedures, unless they get lots of little organizations to join and pay them to swing the vote. Which they've never done in well over a decade of W3C membership, despite being members of the Working Groups for CSS, Web Fonts, HTML, etc., etc. So no, they're probably joining the committee to influence the standard because they want to implement it and have feedback. Like every other implementer. Even if their motives differ a bit.

Why does the US have this fetish with keeping the government out of their private lives, yet allow corporations free reign to use, misuse, misplace and basically be asses with the same information?

That 'fetish' was enshrined in our Bill Of Rights 219 years ago.

Without this 'fetish' of ours things like this might happen. Gimme your name and I'll tell Slashdot what you made last year. :)

As a rule Islamic governance avoids interfering with markets and has recognized a right to privacy for 1400 years, so Norway is in for some changes. Your nation will be 20% Muslim inside the next decade; will Norwegians be so belligerent as to deny Sharia Law for even that long? Given Norway's record of rolling over for conquerors I have to doubt it.

Good luck with that.

I've been following the progress of a Finnish electric car project:

Quote:
"we are offering the open source blueprints of the electric conversion kits globally and leave the manufacturing of the kits to the markets"

http://www.sahkoautot.fi/eng
http://ecars-now.wikidot.com/

Second this.

I picked up a 500GB Worldbook off of e-bay for $70 USD. I installed Debian on it, and yes, it's a pain. I had to disassemble the device, remove the hard drive & plug it in to another computer.

But your requirements are pretty modest. You could get what you want without doing a full OS reinstall.There is a small hacking community centered around this device
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/ssh-enable

Getting an ssh server up and running is pretty easy. Getting nfs up and running is marked as 'difficult' but I didn't find it that hard. You can get a webserver up and running pretty easy (but it's lighthttpd instead of apache). imap isn't a stock install, but you can get it after enabling some repositories for gumstix (which are compatible)
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Gumstix

You could do all of this without overwriting any of the stock western digital software. No disassembly. No soldering. No repartitioning. No messing around with the bootloader. All software hacking. Everything over the ethernet port. This is the approach I'd recommend.

It's nice and compact and it runs at about 15W.

ps. Note that there is a performance boost to be had in wiping the disk and installing Debian. The software that western digital puts in there is pretty crappy. There are some MioNet java and perl processes that usually eat up about 30% of your system resources. A clean Debian install runs much faster. But hey, it's only got 32MB of Ram, so it's never going to run that fast anyway

Configurable USB Loader ( http://www.gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=147638 ) can back up and launch disc images from a usb hard drive or SDHC. You'll need a drive/SD card dedicated to this, though, since it needs to be specially formatted. It can be launched from the homebrew channel, or it can be isntalled as a channel in your system menu.
 
Here's another good place to start reading: http://gwht.wikidot.com/usb-loader. It has links to installation instructions for prerequisites as well. And if you want to read up on the vocabulary, check out the WiiBrew wiki: http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Main_Page.

If you were serious about wanting to be the UI designer for a FOSS project, please check out http://explicans.wikidot.com/ and maybe email me or post a message to the mailing list. This project needs a lead designer.

Of course I'm biased, but IMHO this project has the potential to be big and the UI design of it is really interesting.

I actually predicted this almost three years ago and made a website for it.

http://gpla.wikidot.com/

"This site is the home for the new Global Patent Litigation Agreement.

Our mission:

Patent anything in the world
Sue anyone in the world
Our slogan:

One Court to Rule them All
What is the GPLA?

The setting up of a Global Patent Judiciary by international treaty
The construction of a Global Patent Court with full jurisdiction over all patent matters
GPLA is cheap, easy, effective litigation for any WIPO patent. GPLA turns WIPO patents from worthless paper into money machines.

Note: GPLA is would be run by the WIPO Administrative Council."

Suite! Saw on Snowleopard Compatibility List (not Apple affiliated), they have CS 3 as having minor bugs with Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

and PC changes what? If eg cs3 does not work in windows 7 for example, he has the same problem. If you are a professional designer, you are very much locked in to Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, etc. There are no alternatives.

And the biggest Problem is the versions, We have have all possible version of everything here at work, from old school os9 photoshop, to cs, cs2, cs3, cs4.

And why does he need to upgrade to snow leopard if he doubts cs3 will be supported there? And as written above, what support? And cs3 works (see here: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/).

And if he thinks he can replace any of the Adobe tools with some open source thing, good luck and happy failure. Gimp will not replace Photoshop at all, not even close. Especially on OS X it is not only a mess, but dog slow. I don't use Inkscape a lot, so I can't say how it holds up to Illustrator, neither can I say anything about Scribus because I have not even tried it.

But when you need to deliver a document to be printed on a offset printer and you tool does not support CMYK and the connected tools for it, you are pretty much very much ultimate screwed.

PDF indeed has the advantage of being a fairly reliable way to deliver formal documents to end users. I get e-tickets as PDFs, and I send out invoices as PDFs.

There has always been a burden of turning information into knowledge, and Word used to be one of the better ways of doing this, as an individual author.

But more and more we prepare such formal documents mechanically, and we use other ways to create the really interesting works, which today are collaborative, not individual.

For me, the advent of cheap wiki platforms like Wikidot.com show the future. No paper, no heavy editors, but very rich collaborative tools that let us build knowledge bases through massive collaboration. In other words Wiki is killing Word.

Now, I am hoping for a simple wiki-based replacement for spreadsheets and presentations. Not emulation, but replacement.

http://ecars-now.wikidot.com/

Plus, the summary does a pretty awful job of getting to the real story. I've been following the development thread and chat since the rooting of the Pre was first announced. The motivation for the development forum's choice to stop talking about tethering wasn't eagerness to avoid lawsuits, it was appreciation for the way that Palm engineers have been interacting with the "underground" community.

Palm engineers have been involved in the unofficial dev forum threads and chat, dropping hints, giving the "hackers" knowledge that might have otherwise taken weeks or months for them to discover unaided.

The big stories here are:
1) Palm DIDN'T send a cease and desist. They nicely said, "Hey, if you want us to keep helping you out here, stop talking about tethering."

2) The Pre Dev community is doing some amazing things, thanks to the fact that the Pre is essentially a little Linux box with a nifty GUI.

3) It doesn't really matter that the affected wiki and forum aren't discussing tethering, since solutions have already been released elsewhere.

Want to get involved yourself? Head over to the most active dev thread at Precentral.net, contribute to the Wiki, or join the chat at #webos-internals on FreeNode (irc.freenode.net).

Er, well, here's where I got that from.

If you have a better source, that's cool.

Well, neither of those systems were networked or quite up to par with the business machines out there in the day, but there were plenty of Amiga viruses floating around, thanks to its widespread homebrew and piracy.

The Commodore 64 and Atari didn't exactly have permanent storage, so the worst you could do would be to have an annoying attachment to a diskette/tape/cartridge that wouldn't transfer to other media unless used during the same session. However, that in mind, there does happen to be at least one Commodore 64 virus widespread enough to have been documented.

The moronic tone of your post suggests that you are in fact just trolling, so I'm not going to waste time replying fully, but see http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/t-39889/variation-to-the-vista-map-drive-problem for an example of a single problem. Which "button" do you push to solve this problem? Note that I'm not dumb enough to have installed Vista as you probably are, this is an issue that a friend of mine is having. I'm quite happy with my Ubuntu netbook that can cold boot in 30 seconds flat even with its piddly little Atom processor.

Hi,
We've (My workshop partner and I) created a (basis for a) 3D captcha:
the basic idea is having 3 human models look at different objects.
the challenge is to point at a certain body part of the model looking at a certain object.

I'm assuming a classifier will be able to solve this, but a simple complication of having to solve more than one challenge to gain access to the resource, should increase the difficulty exponentially.

for more details (and source code), see:

http://tau-itw.wikidot.com/project:3-d-captcha

Regards.
Omer.

You can also just press backspace to move up one level.

Or install QTTabBar.

Or buy Mavis Up Button for $5 (lame, I know).

Personally I say get QTTabBar, as is it free, adds an up button, gives you tabbed explorer windows and is skinnable to match whatever look you want. It works with XP also.

One does not write a web server in Bash

Uh oh. Someone should have warned this guy.

I actually do something similar for my greylisting solution, scraping the SpamCop top offending /24 CIDR blocks and giving them a longer grey-time. It helps cut down on spam drastically.

I also do something similar within SpamAssassin, giving anything in APNIC an extra 0.5 points (with bayes and net). Here's that SA rule if you like:

header KHOP_THRU_APNIC Received =~ /[^0-9.](?:5[89]|6[01]|12[456]|20[23]|21[0189]|22[012])(?:\.[012]?[0-9]{1,2}){3}(\]|\)| )/
describe KHOP_THRU_APNIC Received through a relay in Asia/Pacific Network
score KHOP_THRU_APNIC 0.4 0.2 0.9 0.5 # lowered for autolearn and use w/ BLs

As mentioned by earlier posts here, there are just too many hosts to implement a straight-up blacklist hack like the two I just mentioned. We'd need some easier whois lookup or URIBL mechanism to deal with this. And those registrars are BIG and surely likely to have legitimate sites hosted too, so it must be in its own SpamAssassin test with a lower score.

[...]instant Start Menu search[...] breadcrumb navigation in Windows Explorer [...] However, these are things that can be added to XP - I just wish the authors of such addons would refrain from making them look exactly like Vista, because that doesn't look good with my XP classic theme.

Links to apps (I'm sure others exist too):

Vista Start Menu

breadcrumbs

For any one interested further, you might want to read or help contribute to the procedural content generation wiki at pcg.wikidot.com.

"Procedural" refers to the fact that content is being generated on-the-fly, rather than stored in giant texture files. It is derived from the procedural scripts used to define the parameters for the object to be created (although with the power of scripting languages today, one could argue that this no longer applies).

In fact, there's a wiki for this stuff.

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

Tomato plantain tomato grass corn, spinach fish!

I have the 1TB version.

What I don't like:
- the box has a 1Gb ethernet port, but apparently the processor is too slow to get high transfer rates (as you can read in other replies). This was a turn-off when I found this out--of course only after I bought it.

What I do like:
- It runs Linux and it's hackable (Woohoo!). See http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/. Speeds can be improved somewhat by hacking it.
- It's fast enough for streaming video and audio.
- Full backups take some time, but for incremental backups, it's acceptable.

All in all, I'm quite content (though not ecstatic) with the little box.

I have spent the past month developing a similar monitoring backend to the enterprise cluster I am building here (though not in java). This looks very interesting and I will definitely give this a shot.

Look at the screenshots! My architecture was somewhat similar but my interface feels like dark age compared to this!

Indeed, Guitar Hero has its own open-source clone, Frets on Fire. There are also other clones like Guitar Zero, but I'm not familiar with them. I recommend using one of FoF's better mods like RF-mod (less crashes, better performance, and a more GH-like experience, including two-player mode). Buy a couple of PS2 GH guitars and PS2->USB adapters, or just plain USB guitars, and you'll have a console-like GH experience on PC.

Physical to Physical interactions over IP using cheap and easy systems.

For example, Touch someone over IP.

Well, at least that explains how the Irene Demova Virus could affect only a single brand of laptop. Now we just have to hope that teh terrists use unpatched HP laptops as bomb timers.

D'oh. Just noticed your comment about not wanting to purchase a new video card for the Windows port... Since that basically invalidates the majority of my last post, I'll focus more on the fact that buying the game would net you an official Guitar Hero controller that, per the last link in my previous post, can be used with Frets on Fire to make the experience that much more authentic. Plus, as you pointed out, FoF also lets you import songs from GH, so the $80 package would give you the hardware and the content, just not the software, which you would be supplying yourself through FoF.

While I completely understand the desire to have an open source alternative to anything, as you pointed out, the lack of licensed songs will be a dealbreaker for an open source Guitar Hero clone. As you expressed reservations about having to buy an entire console in addition to the game, allow me to point out that you can purchase just the game alone (well, game and guitar controller) for Windows and Mac (in one package) for a relatively-measly $80.

And to make the deal even sweeter, Frets on Fire allows you to use the guitar controller, too, so you can have the best of both worlds.

For one thing, it seems as if though the system only works with Windoze. The easiest way to make it do what you want is to take the drives out and put them into a free computer. It is better and possible to unlock it (this reference) but it's a pain in the neck and clearly against the intentions of the maker.

More importantly, ESR's prediction of M$ behavior is something you should generalize to the entire non free software ecosystem. He predicted collusion with the MAFIAA to force hardware based restrictions and he predicted attacks on freedom based on freedom being a "terrorist" asset. That they are doing it with free software is a double ding. Having free software won't do any good if WD, M$ and friends push bad laws that require all files to have "verifiable media license authentication" or other digital restrictions controlled by others. That's the direction ESR predicted we would be heading and the World Book is both physical and ideological proof that he was right.

Here (http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/hacks-and-howto)

I've used an old linux machine with two drives in software raid1 over the years, and it's been great. I even had three hard drives fail, and each time it recovered nicely.

The old machine was too loud and not worth the time upgrading to latest versions of stuff... so I went to Best Buy, and crossed my fingers and bought a MyBookWorld which is a small enclosure with two 500MB drives. It comes in raid 0, but it can be switched to raid1 (it takes about a day to do the conversion.)

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was linux, and I could enable ssh and use rsync + ssh to move stuff onto it.

It's not as quiet as it could be, and it's got silly ass restrictions on usernames (must be at least 5 chars) and passwords (no symbols) and it insits on making your shares UPPER case. Otherwise... it's great.

If you really get annoyed at it, there are some people who have just installed debian on the thing...

There's a forum on hacking it at wikidot:
    http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/forum/start

The throughput is a little slow, It takes about 6 minutes per GB for me. It also lights up the room with some of the breathing bright blue leds. I keep mine in the basement next to my switch & DSL... and am very happy with it.

As someone who regularly uses both Gimp and Photoshop, I disagree.

Gimp has it's own workflow which is different from Photoshop, but isn't particularly impenetrable. There are some things I find easier to do in Gimp than PS (check out liquid rescale for a cool plugin, for example), and considering Gimp's free, it's no-brainer to have it installed alongside my other graphics tools.

I think there are people for whom there is only The One graphics tool to bind them, and they'll never be comfortable with anything else. Me, I like a full toolkit.