I'm pretty sure you can already do encrypted filesystems on Mandrake, as with just about any linux out there:
first patch the kernel for some decent crypto support - if you don't patch it you're stuck with XOR or maybe DES, which is pretty much not worth the effort. Not sure what currently comes with Mandrake - I seem to recall it downloading some optional crypto?
You can make the file any size you want (and bonus! you can change the size, there's an e2fsresize program or something out there that does it...)
losetup -e serpent/dev/loop0/etc/cryptfile
Put in a password. Make sure it's a good one cos you can't change it later...
mkfs -t ext2/dev/loop0
mount -t ext2/dev/loop0/mnt/crypt
Then unmount when you're done with it (otherwise it's completely readable anyway... )
umount/dev/loop0
losetup -d/dev/loop0
Irrelevent, I know, but fun.And of course this way it isn't done with a GUI... nor can you encrypt your entire disk... but anyway, in case it helps.Personally, I find the ability to do this extremely neat, which says it all.
As for subscriptions, I'm going to be donating as much as I can as soon as I get paid. Without Mandrake, my family would still be working their way through successive generations of Windows - whereas these days they get to spend the time they would otherwise have used staring at BSODS in arguing over who gets to be the penguin with the pigtails.
From the article linked: According to Gilmore's Web site, Verio agreed last August not to terminate his service if he modified his mailer software to avoid forwarding large quantities of e-mail from single addresses over short periods of time.
I don't know whether they're referring to addresses or email addresses there, however. But the attitude most people seem to have (he hasn't done ANYTHING! Why not!) suggests that most people didn't actually read the article;-)
Formalising peer-to-peer filesharing in conjunction with a completely redesigned OS, the concepts of distributed computing and micropayments? Why not?... after all, then you can find some nifty acronym for the whole thing. Which turns out to have been previously used in this case by the International Seminar for Oriental Studies.
It's an interesting idea and handy in its own way, but taken to the extreme - would you want your system controlled by a central server, possibly owned either by government or by a consortium of some kind? And all of your files backed up somewhere else on the network, way out of your reach?
I am way too paranoid for this.
Also: Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem.
Doesn't this assume that Mary is not connected to the Internet by an antiquated modem? In which case, surely she can't download at 10 megabits a second either...
I know at least one UK university in which they teach most of the programming component of CS courses in either Java on Windows (if you're really lucky) or Oberon - a disgustingly incomplete toy language existing only to prove that you can teach programming concepts to students without offering them any preparation for the real world whatsoever.
It's so old that the version they give you still requires 8.3 filenames (PROGRA~1 lessons, anybody?)
Whereas, by contrast, places like ESSI (France) teach as many real-world languages as their students can cope with, on just about whatever platform you want. They even have courses on Postscript...
Most ESSI graduates tend to run Linux. Most CS graduates from the UK university tend to be slightly terrified and clueless. Of course, there are exceptions to both.
High def. TV looks great with a good signal. Unfortunately, last time I saw one (demo model in an expensive hi-fi shop), whilst the image was crisp and clear and all the rest of it, the signal it was displaying was lousy - it was showing a standard UK digital TV signal, if I recall, a news program. Every moving image displayed compression artifacts that were all too visible on the lovely clear screen.I haven't the least idea what compression/bandwidth it actually was, but it didn't look too good.
I concede your point, but then I really intended the 'as we do at work - share home directories' to illustrate the procedure followed in my current workplace. Since we all work in the same building (or by VPN, which means a high-speed linkup which we of course already have. If we didn't, we wouldn't be trying to work long-distance, would we? or we'd be carrying a laptop...), we have the good fortune to be able to do this quite easily;-)
And of course, in the case you suggest it's vastly simpler to follow my first suggestion - log in as yourself on your friend's computer. If you've never logged in before, then you are of course a new user and get the default - familiar - interface. It might not be your very own dream interface, but at least it isn't your friend's own oddly customised version. And no modems required.
QED;-)
Re:In the beginning there was the command line!
on
Jef Raskin Talks Skins
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A group of researchers applied GOMS (which is a form of task analysis) to a new workstation designed for use by telephone company toll and assistance operators.
The new workstation should have been faster, according to those that designed it, because it:
Ran on a faster network
Had a 'better' GUI
The keyboard was remapped and some of the functions moved to allegedly speed up the operations.
and so on.
However, task analysis (and real-world testing) showed that the new system was in fact slower. There are technical reasons for this, eg. that although the network ran faster, the original system had redrawn line by line and therefore the operators had not needed to wait for the screen to completely draw... but partly, it was that some of the alterations that they had made were about as useful as feet on a fish.
A 'better gui'? What does that have to do with telecom operation? And many of the changes they'd made to the keyboard had taken operations that they would originally have done in 'slack time' and placed them in the critical path so that the operators actually had to type faster...
All this doesn't prove that command lines are necessarily faster.
What it does show is that many of the assumptions made by those who try to design 'better interfaces' are wrong - eg. the GUI - and that if you want to design an efficient user interface, you absolutely have to do it to suit a particular user or class of users. For a different user - say, an untrained beginner to the job - the Project Ernestine interface might have been far easier to use.... and therefore initially more efficient...
*sigh*
UI research is a hard problem. In my personal opinion, the current state of research is seriously broken in a number of ways - how do you measure the usability of a program? Why, you measure its efficiency! Um... but maybe I'm not looking to get my image drawn 0.56 seconds faster, but to get some artistic inspiration going? Well then, the 'state of the art' choice is probably heuristic evaluation, which is virtually empirical and just about has a sort of scientific basis. And it certainly won't tell you just how happy a user is. At which point it all comes down to using questionnaires. And at that point, you might as well kiss all this scientific theory stuff goodbye completely...
We tend to think of software as a tool, and computers as the beepy box on which those tools rely. I feel that this devalues the computer. User interfaces, in my uninformed opinion, tend to hide the computer (the freedom, as with the command line, to create more tools, fluidly) behind buttons, toolbars, and predefined courses of action. But what do I know?;-)
Re:UI expert is missing something (as usual)
on
Jef Raskin Talks Skins
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The same quote bothered me:
There's a more important point to be made. Preferences eat up resources. They make the software larger
I think that perhaps he is thinking of the sort of monolithic software that uses its own design of skinning. Personally, I tend to use Gnome (right now, but KDE is essentially the same sort of a thing in this regard)... and as far as I know, skinning these applications is something that you can do either per application, or overall (with the.gtkrc).
And I fail to see entirely why the fact that the toolkit gives you the ability to do this should make each program written with this toolkit any larger. In fact, I am tempted to conclude that he just doesn't really know anything about the way (GNU/)Linux has been designed, and is therefore making uninformed conclusions.
Furthermore, surely he's making an error when he describes his 'issue' with customisation of interfaces - he claims that if you change machines and use somebody else's, then you will become confused and fail to work effectively (sure, XMMS skins do that to me every time... I just can't find the 'play' button behind that anime snapshot, mm hmm). Levity aside, surely on a Linux system you do the simplest thing - log out of that user's system and log in again as yourself. Ta-da! Instant default interface. Or do as we do at work - share home directories, so that wherever you log in, you always get your very own preferences.
We Have The Technology. And Have Had Since Unix Began, Pretty Much.
Also, of course, if you happen to dislike this bloke's default interface so much that you can't use its super-effective and efficient user-interface (see for example the evil green screen that came with Atari STs and was presumably their idea of efficient...) you're a bit stuck, aren't you? Parallels with the oft-cited communist principle of 'one kind of toothbrush is enough for everybody' come to mind, ridiculous as they are.
Don't get me wrong; he has a point (I'm studying this precious theory of his right now, I'm a graduate student in the field). However, like most UI experts, who tend to come from the fields of psychology verging on the sociology rather than comp/sci, he is monumentally blind to the workings of technology.
Many people here are always saying how much amazingly good stuff is available on P2P services that is entirely legal, etcetera.
This seems to me like a fairly good opportunity of proving it; how about a Slashdot P2P? Wait until each discussion is a day old/closed/whatever, and all the people who just read the stuff without posting can fire up their favourite client and download a nice postscript, pdf or whatever version.
If you truly claim that the bandwidth problem is the reason why Slashdot need adverts/subscription model, then surely this is a solution that users who don't post might find acceptable. Slashdot only need to fire the thing off at the end of the day...
Of course, if this is just a/. 'get rich' thing, or a VA Linux Emergency Revenue Production Model, then this doesn't help them at all.:-)
Ah, well, I felt like being kind, and by common cultural accord therefore had the options of Faith, Hope and Charity - and they do say that the greatest of these is Charity.
So let's charitably call him a journalist;-P
Having said that, lying is probably a deadly sin, and 'hopeless optimism' isn't officially one of the virtues... so maybe I'll rephrase that to, ummm, "hack", perhaps with an addendum to the effect that his writing style as of this article suggests that, should he mislay his arse, he couldn't relocate it with both hands.
"Leonardo da Vince is well-known was history's greatest integrator of art and science, " writes Wilson, but he was by no means unique in having interests that spanned art and science.
Wilson has brought together the work great artists and thinkers in culture and technology[...]
However, it is evident that Wilson is not a follower of 'Da Vince', who, incidentally, is more commonly spelt with an extra i and no e. Whilst other people were learning spelling and grammar, Wilson was clearly elsewhere - unless, and I don't seriously suggest this possibility for a moment, Katz merely misquoted the poor man.
Actually this looks as though it might be an interesting read, though perhaps somewhat pretentious. On the other hand, I think maybe it is really time to book Katz into some sort of literacy rehab centre for tired journalists.
Actually there are some alternative services for that. Some articles, for example, are available in full from authors' sites and/or services like Citeseer. I don't think Yahoo ever offered it as a free service, though.
The BBC article says 640x480. As I don't believe they'd have made that mistake, I'm assuming that the version they saw is different to the one on the homepage... an early version, maybe? or maybe the BBC's technical staff are all MCSE... It's not out until March according to the BBC so maybe it's a prototype.
added to which, it doesn't look all that comfortable to wear or use, either.
Incidentally, if the submitter sent in a link to the BBC talking about the new xybernaut Poma, maybe it would have been a good idea to include that link?
And the image on that page really does show off how stupid a user can look. It's shown off by Xybernaut president Edward Newman and he really does look daft with all those wires dangling off his headband.
They say that in the future the screens will be 'integrated into the lenses of glasses'. Until that day I think they'd be better off keeping to a good sound card for output device, even though it requires more effort (short-term memory usage) to listen to something than read it. This unit is somewhat underpowered for decent speech synthesis though, at 128 mhz it would be something of an effort.
Oh, and finally, would you really enjoy using an 'equivalent to a 15 inch colour screen' at 640x480? Somebody in a past slashdot discussion described this phenomenon as 'pixels the size of fists'. Ouch.
If NTL has the same pricing structure as BlueYonder/Telewest, which I think it does, you're looking at:
35 pounds per month for Internet+telephone+basic TV (the standard five channels or whatever)
An extra 25 per month gets you free local and national calls; in fact, an extra 40 quid per month gets you free calls and everything possible on the TV channels front. So for 75 pounds a month you have just about every service they offer, minus I suppose the pay-per-view porn services.
As an HCI student I can see the interest in writing your own window manager (I'd like to do this myself... although starting from scratch might not be the best way)
If this is actually what you want to do, make sure that you can't customise an existing one before you start all over again - the chances are you could take a simple system like FVWM ie. something minimal, and just put a few custom toolbars and such on it.
Try looking at the source code to other window managers. You can find several on freshmeat that are absolutely tiny ie. a couple of hundred k. The gzipped source for aewm, for example, is apparently under 50k - incredible:P
If you're after rewriting the windowing system itself and you're doing it for HCI related reasons, I think you may be nuts. There may be a good reason to do this but it doesn't spring to mind. Whereas there are - arguably - huge numbers of usability problems with window managers in general... low consistency, little feedback, that sort of thing.
All I can see for adverts on there are the irritating click-through adverts they have, and the box on the right with 'advertisement' sneakily added above it with a list of amazingly predictable make-money-fast headlines in pseudo-real-link blue (time zone to time zone, never set your watch again! Apparently).
I can't quite see how it would be possible to stick adverts in this list anyway since they credit the source of each story after the news article's title. Somehow I can't quite imagine clicking on a link
- Brilliant new Internet Camera comes on the Market - X10 (Jan 8, 2002)
Added to which, if they are really doing what this story claims they're pretty darn hypocritical, given that they have stories like Pop-ups begone! How to kill those pesky ads in their database.
So in summary, all a script has to do to get root on your system is to edit your configuration and then hope you, like nearly anybody, use the su command occasionally.
maybe then one of the things that might need some attention to it is the permissions your everyday user has on their own.login... I guess I'll just disallow myself from altering my own config files, just in case I find something untrusted and binary to play with....
what is there stopping a virus in my home directory from replacing 'su' in my path and then nicking my root password that way, saying 'Sorry' and then wandering off with its root privileges and doing whatever it feels like with them? As it were.
I'm sure there's an answer to this somewhere, I just never got around to looking it up...
DeCSS isn't a trade secret any longer, according to this kuro5hin story from November, and also according to the story linked to from the Norwegian site... According to the EFF even the DVD CCA have stopped attempting to limit its distribution.
Also, according to this, the DVD CCA claimed at least once that reverse engineering the CSS code was 'in principal lawful', and that the illegal part of it was from the fact that the reverse engineering was done from a piece of software which required you to click through a contract that said you agreed not to do so.
All of which makes me wonder why the Norwegians have decided to make a fuss about it now. Just when I thought we'd finally heard the last of CSS lawsuits.
Added to which, I have no idea about the Norwegian law but surely the kid was a minor at the time? He's only 18 now! Maybe it's different in Norway but most countries seem to relax laws somewhat for children...?
About the surrender or otherwise of Japan: Marc Ferro (who is a French historian specialising in modern history, particularly focussing on WWII and Russia specifically) has reportedly found evidence to suggest that the Japanese were willing to comply with the available terms for surrender surrender a long time before the bombs were dropped. They apparently told Stalin about this at the time of Yalta, but it was not in the interests of the USSR to forward the message (they would probably have preferred the US to get dragged into a war with Japan whilst the USSR concentrated on Europe).
Roosevelt refused to consider anything but 'unconditional surrender', in any case, so who knows if, even if this is a fact and the USSR had acted otherwise, it would have made any difference? Background reading suggests that even within the US military a number of people were both conversant with Japanese culture and fairly vocal about it, and furthermore that at least some of these had reached the right conclusions as to the sticking point against surrender.
So... what went wrong in this communication process, really? Stubborn refusal on the part of those leading the process to look past their mutual prejudices? Simple lack of trust? Or maybe the 'Japanese won't surrender' solution simply looked more believable. All rather academic at this point, since the bomb was dropped and appeared to work rather well. But there's probably a lesson in there somewhere for today's Fearless Leaders.
Disclaimer: It's 6am here. I dare anybody to speak lucidly at this time of the morning.
Given that The Register had a story on the discovery of a Windows trojan found in Limewire and such, it doesn't seem implausible that the companies in question didn't sit down and think about what the rest of the code did.
Added to which, whilst I agree that spyware is Not A Good Thing, it seems kind of weird that the companies producing distributed filesharing applications would be intending to monitor precisely what said applications are used for. That would presumably make it harder for them to claim innocence when the RIAA come calling? Or so it seems to my addled mind.
They did actually mention making it transparently recompilable to other nixes or words to that effect. Granted, I am not a FreeBSD user but I suspect that BSD being a unix-like AFAIK, it was probably supposed to be included in that part of the paragraph.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure you can already do encrypted filesystems on Mandrake, as with just about any linux out there:
/dev/loop0 /etc/cryptfile
/dev/loop0
/dev/loop0 /mnt/crypt
/dev/loop0
/dev/loop0
first patch the kernel for some decent crypto support - if you don't patch it you're stuck with XOR or maybe DES, which is pretty much not worth the effort. Not sure what currently comes with Mandrake - I seem to recall it downloading some optional crypto?
Then follow the HOWTO available out there:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/etc/cryptfile bs=1M count=10
You can make the file any size you want (and bonus! you can change the size, there's an e2fsresize program or something out there that does it...)
losetup -e serpent
Put in a password. Make sure it's a good one cos you can't change it later...
mkfs -t ext2
mount -t ext2
Then unmount when you're done with it (otherwise it's completely readable anyway... )
umount
losetup -d
Irrelevent, I know, but fun.And of course this way it isn't done with a GUI... nor can you encrypt your entire disk... but anyway, in case it helps.Personally, I find the ability to do this extremely neat, which says it all.
As for subscriptions, I'm going to be donating as much as I can as soon as I get paid. Without Mandrake, my family would still be working their way through successive generations of Windows - whereas these days they get to spend the time they would otherwise have used staring at BSODS in arguing over who gets to be the penguin with the pigtails.
From the article linked: According to Gilmore's Web site, Verio agreed last August not to terminate his service if he modified his mailer software to avoid forwarding large quantities of e-mail from single addresses over short periods of time.
;-)
I don't know whether they're referring to addresses or email addresses there, however. But the attitude most people seem to have (he hasn't done ANYTHING! Why not!) suggests that most people didn't actually read the article
Formalising peer-to-peer filesharing in conjunction with a completely redesigned OS, the concepts of distributed computing and micropayments? Why not?... after all, then you can find some nifty acronym for the whole thing. Which turns out to have been previously used in this case by the International Seminar for Oriental Studies.
It's an interesting idea and handy in its own way, but taken to the extreme - would you want your system controlled by a central server, possibly owned either by government or by a consortium of some kind? And all of your files backed up somewhere else on the network, way out of your reach?
I am way too paranoid for this.
Also: Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem.
Doesn't this assume that Mary is not connected to the Internet by an antiquated modem? In which case, surely she can't download at 10 megabits a second either...
Ah, that could be it. They claimed it to be HDTV, but then again, they didn't seem to know much about it....
You are lucky.
I know at least one UK university in which they teach most of the programming component of CS courses in either Java on Windows (if you're really lucky) or Oberon - a disgustingly incomplete toy language existing only to prove that you can teach programming concepts to students without offering them any preparation for the real world whatsoever.
It's so old that the version they give you still requires 8.3 filenames (PROGRA~1 lessons, anybody?)
Whereas, by contrast, places like ESSI (France) teach as many real-world languages as their students can cope with, on just about whatever platform you want. They even have courses on Postscript...
Most ESSI graduates tend to run Linux. Most CS graduates from the UK university tend to be slightly terrified and clueless. Of course, there are exceptions to both.
Here's a negative story: HDTV itself.
High def. TV looks great with a good signal. Unfortunately, last time I saw one (demo model in an expensive hi-fi shop), whilst the image was crisp and clear and all the rest of it, the signal it was displaying was lousy - it was showing a standard UK digital TV signal, if I recall, a news program. Every moving image displayed compression artifacts that were all too visible on the lovely clear screen.I haven't the least idea what compression/bandwidth it actually was, but it didn't look too good.
Well...
;-)
;-)
I concede your point, but then I really intended the 'as we do at work - share home directories' to illustrate the procedure followed in my current workplace. Since we all work in the same building (or by VPN, which means a high-speed linkup which we of course already have. If we didn't, we wouldn't be trying to work long-distance, would we? or we'd be carrying a laptop...), we have the good fortune to be able to do this quite easily
And of course, in the case you suggest it's vastly simpler to follow my first suggestion - log in as yourself on your friend's computer. If you've never logged in before, then you are of course a new user and get the default - familiar - interface. It might not be your very own dream interface, but at least it isn't your friend's own oddly customised version. And no modems required.
QED
Look up Project Ernestine.
;-)
A group of researchers applied GOMS (which is a form of task analysis) to a new workstation designed for use by telephone company toll and assistance operators.
The new workstation should have been faster, according to those that designed it, because it:
Ran on a faster network
Had a 'better' GUI
The keyboard was remapped and some of the functions moved to allegedly speed up the operations.
and so on.
However, task analysis (and real-world testing) showed that the new system was in fact slower. There are technical reasons for this, eg. that although the network ran faster, the original system had redrawn line by line and therefore the operators had not needed to wait for the screen to completely draw... but partly, it was that some of the alterations that they had made were about as useful as feet on a fish.
A 'better gui'? What does that have to do with telecom operation? And many of the changes they'd made to the keyboard had taken operations that they would originally have done in 'slack time' and placed them in the critical path so that the operators actually had to type faster...
All this doesn't prove that command lines are necessarily faster.
What it does show is that many of the assumptions made by those who try to design 'better interfaces' are wrong - eg. the GUI - and that if you want to design an efficient user interface, you absolutely have to do it to suit a particular user or class of users. For a different user - say, an untrained beginner to the job - the Project Ernestine interface might have been far easier to use.... and therefore initially more efficient...
*sigh*
UI research is a hard problem. In my personal opinion, the current state of research is seriously broken in a number of ways - how do you measure the usability of a program? Why, you measure its efficiency! Um... but maybe I'm not looking to get my image drawn 0.56 seconds faster, but to get some artistic inspiration going? Well then, the 'state of the art' choice is probably heuristic evaluation, which is virtually empirical and just about has a sort of scientific basis. And it certainly won't tell you just how happy a user is. At which point it all comes down to using questionnaires. And at that point, you might as well kiss all this scientific theory stuff goodbye completely...
We tend to think of software as a tool, and computers as the beepy box on which those tools rely. I feel that this devalues the computer. User interfaces, in my uninformed opinion, tend to hide the computer (the freedom, as with the command line, to create more tools, fluidly) behind buttons, toolbars, and predefined courses of action. But what do I know?
The same quote bothered me:
.gtkrc).
There's a more important point to be made. Preferences eat up resources. They make the software larger
I think that perhaps he is thinking of the sort of monolithic software that uses its own design of skinning. Personally, I tend to use Gnome (right now, but KDE is essentially the same sort of a thing in this regard)... and as far as I know, skinning these applications is something that you can do either per application, or overall (with the
And I fail to see entirely why the fact that the toolkit gives you the ability to do this should make each program written with this toolkit any larger. In fact, I am tempted to conclude that he just doesn't really know anything about the way (GNU/)Linux has been designed, and is therefore making uninformed conclusions.
Furthermore, surely he's making an error when he describes his 'issue' with customisation of interfaces - he claims that if you change machines and use somebody else's, then you will become confused and fail to work effectively (sure, XMMS skins do that to me every time... I just can't find the 'play' button behind that anime snapshot, mm hmm). Levity aside, surely on a Linux system you do the simplest thing - log out of that user's system and log in again as yourself. Ta-da! Instant default interface. Or do as we do at work - share home directories, so that wherever you log in, you always get your very own preferences.
We Have The Technology. And Have Had Since Unix Began, Pretty Much.
Also, of course, if you happen to dislike this bloke's default interface so much that you can't use its super-effective and efficient user-interface (see for example the evil green screen that came with Atari STs and was presumably their idea of efficient...) you're a bit stuck, aren't you? Parallels with the oft-cited communist principle of 'one kind of toothbrush is enough for everybody' come to mind, ridiculous as they are.
Don't get me wrong; he has a point (I'm studying this precious theory of his right now, I'm a graduate student in the field). However, like most UI experts, who tend to come from the fields of psychology verging on the sociology rather than comp/sci, he is monumentally blind to the workings of technology.
Okay, here's an idea.
/. 'get rich' thing, or a VA Linux Emergency Revenue Production Model, then this doesn't help them at all. :-)
Many people here are always saying how much amazingly good stuff is available on P2P services that is entirely legal, etcetera.
This seems to me like a fairly good opportunity of proving it; how about a Slashdot P2P? Wait until each discussion is a day old/closed/whatever, and all the people who just read the stuff without posting can fire up their favourite client and download a nice postscript, pdf or whatever version.
If you truly claim that the bandwidth problem is the reason why Slashdot need adverts/subscription model, then surely this is a solution that users who don't post might find acceptable. Slashdot only need to fire the thing off at the end of the day...
Of course, if this is just a
Ah, well, I felt like being kind, and by common cultural accord therefore had the options of Faith, Hope and Charity - and they do say that the greatest of these is Charity.
;-P
So let's charitably call him a journalist
Having said that, lying is probably a deadly sin, and 'hopeless optimism' isn't officially one of the virtues... so maybe I'll rephrase that to, ummm, "hack", perhaps with an addendum to the effect that his writing style as of this article suggests that, should he mislay his arse, he couldn't relocate it with both hands.
Wilson has brought together the work great artists and thinkers in culture and technology[...]
However, it is evident that Wilson is not a follower of 'Da Vince', who, incidentally, is more commonly spelt with an extra i and no e. Whilst other people were learning spelling and grammar, Wilson was clearly elsewhere - unless, and I don't seriously suggest this possibility for a moment, Katz merely misquoted the poor man.
Actually this looks as though it might be an interesting read, though perhaps somewhat pretentious. On the other hand, I think maybe it is really time to book Katz into some sort of literacy rehab centre for tired journalists.
Actually there are some alternative services for that. Some articles, for example, are available in full from authors' sites and/or services like Citeseer. I don't think Yahoo ever offered it as a free service, though.
Apologies for replying to myself:
The BBC article says 640x480. As I don't believe they'd have made that mistake, I'm assuming that the version they saw is different to the one on the homepage... an early version, maybe? or maybe the BBC's technical staff are all MCSE... It's not out until March according to the BBC so maybe it's a prototype.
added to which, it doesn't look all that comfortable to wear or use, either.
Incidentally, if the submitter sent in a link to the BBC talking about the new xybernaut Poma, maybe it would have been a good idea to include that link?
I assume it was this story.
And the image on that page really does show off how stupid a user can look. It's shown off by Xybernaut president Edward Newman and he really does look daft with all those wires dangling off his headband.
They say that in the future the screens will be 'integrated into the lenses of glasses'. Until that day I think they'd be better off keeping to a good sound card for output device, even though it requires more effort (short-term memory usage) to listen to something than read it. This unit is somewhat underpowered for decent speech synthesis though, at 128 mhz it would be something of an effort.
Oh, and finally, would you really enjoy using an 'equivalent to a 15 inch colour screen' at 640x480? Somebody in a past slashdot discussion described this phenomenon as 'pixels the size of fists'. Ouch.
However, we're living in the 20th century
;-)
Actually, you're very likely living in the 21st century...
If NTL has the same pricing structure as BlueYonder/Telewest, which I think it does, you're looking at:
35 pounds per month for Internet+telephone+basic TV (the standard five channels or whatever)
An extra 25 per month gets you free local and national calls; in fact, an extra 40 quid per month gets you free calls and everything possible on the TV channels front. So for 75 pounds a month you have just about every service they offer, minus I suppose the pay-per-view porn services.
That's just a bit over 100 dollars or so.
Conclusion: AOL/TW can dream on.
As an HCI student I can see the interest in writing your own window manager (I'd like to do this myself... although starting from scratch might not be the best way)
:P
If this is actually what you want to do, make sure that you can't customise an existing one before you start all over again - the chances are you could take a simple system like FVWM ie. something minimal, and just put a few custom toolbars and such on it.
Try looking at the source code to other window managers. You can find several on freshmeat that are absolutely tiny ie. a couple of hundred k. The gzipped source for aewm, for example, is apparently under 50k - incredible
If you're after rewriting the windowing system itself and you're doing it for HCI related reasons, I think you may be nuts. There may be a good reason to do this but it doesn't spring to mind. Whereas there are - arguably - huge numbers of usability problems with window managers in general... low consistency, little feedback, that sort of thing.
Weeellll ... if you say so... but -
All I can see for adverts on there are the irritating click-through adverts they have, and the box on the right with 'advertisement' sneakily added above it with a list of amazingly predictable make-money-fast headlines in pseudo-real-link blue (time zone to time zone, never set your watch again! Apparently).
I can't quite see how it would be possible to stick adverts in this list anyway since they credit the source of each story after the news article's title. Somehow I can't quite imagine clicking on a link
- Brilliant new Internet Camera comes on the Market - X10 (Jan 8, 2002)
Added to which, if they are really doing what this story claims they're pretty darn hypocritical, given that they have stories like Pop-ups begone! How to kill those pesky ads in their database.
Eek!
.login... I guess I'll just disallow myself from altering my own config files, just in case I find something untrusted and binary to play with....
:-)
So in summary, all a script has to do to get root on your system is to edit your configuration and then hope you, like nearly anybody, use the su command occasionally.
maybe then one of the things that might need some attention to it is the permissions your everyday user has on their own
Paranoid? Moi?
another silly question:
what is there stopping a virus in my home directory from replacing 'su' in my path and then nicking my root password that way, saying 'Sorry' and then wandering off with its root privileges and doing whatever it feels like with them? As it were.
I'm sure there's an answer to this somewhere, I just never got around to looking it up...
DeCSS isn't a trade secret any longer, according to this kuro5hin story from November, and also according to the story linked to from the Norwegian site... According to the EFF even the DVD CCA have stopped attempting to limit its distribution.
Also, according to this, the DVD CCA claimed at least once that reverse engineering the CSS code was 'in principal lawful', and that the illegal part of it was from the fact that the reverse engineering was done from a piece of software which required you to click through a contract that said you agreed not to do so.
All of which makes me wonder why the Norwegians have decided to make a fuss about it now. Just when I thought we'd finally heard the last of CSS lawsuits.
Added to which, I have no idea about the Norwegian law but surely the kid was a minor at the time? He's only 18 now! Maybe it's different in Norway but most countries seem to relax laws somewhat for children...?
About the surrender or otherwise of Japan: Marc Ferro (who is a French historian specialising in modern history, particularly focussing on WWII and Russia specifically) has reportedly found evidence to suggest that the Japanese were willing to comply with the available terms for surrender surrender a long time before the bombs were dropped. They apparently told Stalin about this at the time of Yalta, but it was not in the interests of the USSR to forward the message (they would probably have preferred the US to get dragged into a war with Japan whilst the USSR concentrated on Europe).
Roosevelt refused to consider anything but 'unconditional surrender', in any case, so who knows if, even if this is a fact and the USSR had acted otherwise, it would have made any difference? Background reading suggests that even within the US military a number of people were both conversant with Japanese culture and fairly vocal about it, and furthermore that at least some of these had reached the right conclusions as to the sticking point against surrender.
So... what went wrong in this communication process, really? Stubborn refusal on the part of those leading the process to look past their mutual prejudices? Simple lack of trust? Or maybe the 'Japanese won't surrender' solution simply looked more believable. All rather academic at this point, since the bomb was dropped and appeared to work rather well. But there's probably a lesson in there somewhere for today's Fearless Leaders.
Disclaimer: It's 6am here. I dare anybody to speak lucidly at this time of the morning.
Added to which, whilst I agree that spyware is Not A Good Thing, it seems kind of weird that the companies producing distributed filesharing applications would be intending to monitor precisely what said applications are used for. That would presumably make it harder for them to claim innocence when the RIAA come calling? Or so it seems to my addled mind.
They did actually mention making it transparently recompilable to other nixes or words to that effect. Granted, I am not a FreeBSD user but I suspect that BSD being a unix-like AFAIK, it was probably supposed to be included in that part of the paragraph.