Yeah, besides, it's not like Google was trying to hide the fact they are crawling any Internet site -- The user agent is:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Many sites actually show more information if they detect the Google bot to increase their search rankings.
Later, If you click the search listing and can't see what the bot saw, in most cases, it's not because the search database is out of date, it's because of a pay/register wall bait & switch. Protip: Firefox plugin User Agent Switcher will sometimes let you in with the "right" user agent (if the site doesn't also check IP addresses).
My point is that Google is distributed -- they could hit a site from a different IP range and use a different User Agent string (ie pretend to be Chrome or FF), to hide their identity but they are not... (This is actually how Google detects bait and switch type links).
It's hard to fault a web crawler for crawling the web. This is especially true in Facebook's case since Facebook promotes all those external links back to Facebook pages via "like this" and "follow us on Facebook" links.
When you find the mouse trap has sprung, do you complain that the bait is gone?
There is a bit of belly button lint that is valued at over $900 nonillion dollars! That's more money than there is in the world, many times over! I would say her naval lint is priceless, but I may consider letting someone else farm my girlfriend's belly button, If they transfered the world's wealth to me, many times over (to have destroyed -- that shit's evil, and the world would just make more money).
Remember when Yahoo's stock value jumped because MS tried to buy them? Did you notice how much better Yahoo's service was during this time? Remember how their stock price fell drastically after the MS buy-out fell through? Remember how Yahoo's service just turned to utter shit at the same time? No? Right, because it stayed the same. These companies stock prices and Market Caps mean jack shit... it's all decimal numbers attached to feelings -- if more people feel good about having a larger number of a company's stock, then it's "worth" more, irregardless of the actual value of the products and services the companies make... It's all based on emotions! Feelings!!!
Now, say you're AT&T. Your stock price is worth X because of your profit and loss statement. If you spend some profit to make your company worth more -- improved speeds and reliability -- then your stock price will fall because the investors see that you are not bringing in as much profit.
Yes yes, there are Analysts, this is an over-simplification, the actual value does weigh in somewhat, but the feelings do more so -- This really does hold true in most cases. Ergo, one reason the US has shitty Internet is because of the funny-money market.
Granted, I feel that MS should be worth less than IBM, even though I haven't seen a single IBM brand device anywhere in my house for years... Even though I don't like or own Apple products, I feel that they should be worth more than MS because their fanbois are loud.
Is it any wonder that the feeling based values relate directly to the public's feelings and thus directly are reflected in the stock market?
How are you feeling about the banking/mortgage industry? About as well as they are doing, eh? Wonder why that is... It's a shame we didn't learn our lesson about the funny-money market the first time... I once showed that my neighbor has spent enough money playing the lottery to have purchased things they talk about buying if they win -- C'est la vie, people are dumb.
Physics and chemistry didn't evolve; they sprang into existence fully formed. (Mankind's understanding of them is continually advancing, but the necessary formulas haven't changed since the Big Bang.)
Oops -- there were no "formulas" around until we thinking beings discovered a way to describe the interactions we were seeing. Physics and chemistry did evolve as we had to create and refine them, in reality there is no such thing as chemistry or physics -- these are just mental tools we have created to help us predict future events... it is not really how things happen, even if the happenings appear similar to our predictions, it is only because we choose to classify them as such.
There were clearly things happening long before we happened, and there will never be a precise or fast enough tool to completely and accurately predict any event since a fully described "formula" for complete accurate prediction of events would also include the process by which it is currently being described and evaluated -- the description of which affects the description itself, infinitely.
Only thinking beings try to predict what will happen -- colliding asteroids don't do predictions -- the universe has no need for such a thing: Shit Happens the way it is happening and that's the universe's take on the whole situation.
Science hasn't been around forever, it takes a rational thinking mind to apply the Scientific method -- thus, unless you believe the universe thinks for itself, we brought science to our corner of the Universe. We discovered the relations between the concept of numbers and units and created Math. The universe has no need for numbers -- "How many apples will there be if I eat one of your three?" At the fundamental level this has no real meaning, there is no "apple" -- that is a classification that humans invented for that instance of particularly classified space/time and energy state -- Apples and Oranges and Orangutans are the same things to the universe -- this bunch of twists and knots of space/time energy waves interacts with that bunch over there the way they will, and they have, and are about to some more. The universe becomes the result of me eating the apple, and were I not going to have eaten it, it would have become the state of you having the same you already had.
The very existence of the universe is like the wake of a pebble in a pond. Unaware that it is propagating and ultimately its wave energy is normalizing, it is what it is, and nothing more -- The Universe is so very much like this -- the waves/energies produced by the big bang are just a bit more complex than the wake of the pebble, but the principal is the same. We are part of this energy conversion and fluctuation process -- the pebble's waves reflect upon themselves and realize, "Ooh, isn't all this neat?", and then we are gone, taking our classification systems and prediction tools with us.
The universe does not say, these two groups of space/time energy shall act like "apples", it has no concept of "similarity", it can not differentiate any matter from any other matter, and it treats all parts of itself the same. Some of what we call matter seems to act differently than other classifications we have made of matter, but to the universe it is all the same. All energy and space/time combinations are unique from any other -- We may recognize that some matter and set of potential energies (circumstances) are similar to some other event, but not the Universe. We may classify and attempt to make predictions based on prior events, but the Universe does not.
Thus: A Computer Scientist, is just a more precise classification of Scientist that we have created. Scientists that study primarily Evolution, could then be called Evolutionary Scientists, even though they are Biologists, for the same reason a Scientist studying primarily Applied Computerized Mathematics could be called a Computer Scientist even though they are also Mathematicians.
Seriously, I know it may sound a bit selfish, but here in Texas is where the curriculum of much of the nation is decided due to our huge purchasing power of school books. The publishers do not bend to the will of the smaller states as readily, and they must buy the books that are available from these publishers (personally, give me reprints from the 50s -- they're not nearly as dumbed down). California gets it, last I heard they were banning books that had the Texas curriculum in them.
The problem is that here in Texas religious zealots are pushing to get "intelligent design" taught instead of the Science of evolution; Currently I.D. is being pushed as an alternative, with the hope that teachers can be found that will only want to teach one alternative -- I.D.
The children will not learn without exposure to the scientific information -- I used only MS OSs since MS DOS 3.1 because I did not know about Linux! No one was there to teach me that I had other options than MacOS or Windows.
Texas is the battleground that must be won to keep evolution in many schools across the country.
A huge problem is that many true I.D. believers can not be reasoned with, many are irrational and have no concept of science.
I once showed one of these fundamentalists a well known experiment I was running where each generation of mouse, at 4 weeks old (the brink of maturity for this breed), I put through a chute and if the mouse's tail got caught by the small rear sliding door, I would remove that mouse from the gene pool into a separate habitat. Each generation I shortened the measuring cell's length a bit.
I pointed to the mice in the two different environments and said: "You see -- These mice with the long tails came from the same parents as these mice over here with no tails. Because of the chute's environmental pressure, the mice evolved to be a tailless breed. It was more genetically advantageous for mature mice to have shorter tails here, while there the mice were under no such constraint.
Their response was that I was the intelligent designer -- I argued that it was only a demonstration, if one intelligently imposed environmental pressure could cause a change in the species, then other natural environmental pressures could also have effects that change a species.
They said, "God would be providing such natural pressures." -- I said, "Eureka! So, you agree -- Evolution exists, and may be the very tool your God used to make the variety of species, and that He was smart enough to give his creatures adaptability so they could survive environmental changes!"
They replied: "That is not what The Bible says, and therefore, that is not the truth. I still don't see why your theory of evolution should be taught in schools." I replied, "For the same reason we teach the theory of gravity!", and walked away.
You can't win a logical argument with a fundamentalist -- even if they agree with you, they still disagree on principal.
I hope that the they are just warming up with the "Darwin Day Road Show", so it doesn't seem like an attack at the very heart of the issue, but this is what must happen. Please come to Texas!
P.S. Teach religion in school, fine I don't care -- but just don't remove the Science!
TL;DR: Phhcht -- Houston, we have a fucking problem! We're screwing ourselves out of reasonable people; Over.
According to US copyright law, when you perform a work for hire, such as a painting or a tattoo, the work becomes the property of the person the work is performed for unless otherwise agreed upon.
So the work belonged to Tyson, not the artist at that point (unless they agreed otherwise). And if Tyson gave permission for it to be used, then there is no problem.
Brilliant! I'm getting a tatoo with a flag and a half eaten apple surrounded by a hex code on my ass so I can moon a whole court room full of copyright and trademark litigators when Sony, MS and Apple sue me!
Most of the comments before this one are a good example of the attitude of your average IT person toward this whole "personal equipment" thing.
Me, I work at a different company, where we decided to treat employees like responsible adults. We make sure people know how to secure their equipment and, if they want (and usually they do), we do it for them.
[...]
It's seemed to work pretty well for us, with no noticeable virus outbreaks. It supports that whole "our employees are our biggest asset" stuff that most companies just spout but never believe. In fact, it really comes down to that point -- IT people (much like HR people, BTW) mostly consider employees threat vectors, rather than colleagues. Here? It's the other way. And it seems to work pretty well.
This will work for a while, but there is a reason that the average IT person has the ideas that they do -- It's from experience. If you stay small and are never the target of any more sophisticated attack than a botnet, or spam rootkit, everything will be fine -- those are not threats. I'd rather have every machine in the company be spouting spam and displaying pop-ups about viagra than to have just one tech-savvy disgruntled employee, or capable spear-fisherman dropping zero day exploits on any OS, breaching our customer's confidential information.
If you have sensitive customer data to worry about, it's a whole different ball-game than if you just make stuff -- If you work with toxins or radioactivity, even sewage treatment, it only takes one small slip-up to cause unimaginable damage...
Seriously -- I bet you're one of the same people that's looking down your nose at Sony thinking, "How could they be so dumb!" It can happen to you. When it does -- you have been warned, by an ex-experienced IT person. (work for myself now, hint: "CUSTOMERS are my biggest asset.", any other hogwash is just that.
So... the Firewall stores allowed IP addresses in a table structure, lets say an AVL/RedBlack tree or a hash table. You certainly don't want every outbound connection (hole you punch) in the firewall to be permanent. So, why not add a time stamp, and if it remains unused for a long enough period of time, you remove that IP rule?
You don't want to have to constantly run a background thread that scans the table for expired entries -- That would be needlessly wasteful! Instead, why don't we look at the nodes while we're traversing the tree or hash looking for a match to determine if a packet should be blocked or allowed, and then just remove any expired rules we come across!
In a hash table, collisions (two different addresses mapping to the same bucket) are frequently resolved by storing a pointer to a linked list in the bucket instead of just one address. Since you'll occasionally be iterating across more than one IP rule, you can remove expired rules as you do so -- similar to the way you would for tree traversal.
Obvious, right? I mean... I don't see why no one figured this out a long time ago!
Wait... wait... You're probably thinking of responding with something along the lines of: "No shit, you dumbass, that's how it's done already." I know; I know... that's my point -- That's the way my game servers have been doing things since the early 90s.
Well, there's just one catch -- That's illegal; It can be patent infringing. Remember that patent suit brought against Google by Bedrock claiming that their use of Linux infringes a patent, and that all of Linux may be infringing?
Patent 5,893,120 -- "methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data."
The court found Google to be in violation. Of course the patent should never have been granted... Any professional skilled in the art of hash tables, and familiar with the concept of a stateful firewall will arrive at this solution... (please dissolve the PTO, it's broken, okay?)
So -- I hope Red Hat/Fedora is using a Red-Black tree or AVL tree -- instead of a Hash... I would check, but honestly, I'm a lazy Debian kind of guy.
How about the Open Source crowd figuring a way to deliver broadband for free or close to free? Why not!
It's hard to do -- I've made a few experimental wireless mesh networks using Linux firmware on a bunch of wireless routers.
We're working on it, but really, no one with much power/money wants us to succeed...
There are many problems to overcome -- the main three problems are: latency (many small hops over low powered wireless -- need to use longer range, but those frequencies are strictly regulated), congestion (limited available frequency ranges -- cooperation required for a "rolling" frequency allocation, easy to disrupt), but mostly the problem is the fact that you want something totally different that what we can really offer.
The previous stated problem is better defined as such: You want "Broadband Internet" -- which is far more a specific requirement than "Broadband Network"; The former requires a choke point whereby lots of distributed traffic enters and leaves a hard-line connected to the Internet (at no cost!?!), the latter does not have the requirement but has to iron out many many issues before commercial entities will get on board.
One big problem is adoption. Will you be willing to give up your current ISP, and the entire Web it allows you to access? If not, will you be willing to foot the bill for a node so that the free (as in freedom) network can operate along side, and in addition to your current ISP hardware? If so, will you be willing to bridge the two, despite rediculous "end user" threats (when you're really an ISP)? If not, will you publish content on the free net with a license that allows everyone to copy it infinitely?
My mesh network had adequate speed for most uses (email, chat, voip), but streaming HD video did not scale well (100+ routers over 4 square blocks servicing approx. 80 "homes") -- no caching servers implemented yet... (do you want to host data that's not yours? If so, can you get the copyright license to do so? If so can everyone get that license for free? -- copyright law has no place in modern technology, we must copy everything all the time, and we need the legal restrictions lifted so that we can! Note: ISP routers already to this with indemnity, but our distributed "torrent" like network will face legal threats.)
There has to be a global or at least national solution to connectivity (how easy will it be to buy & install a node/host), identity (how will someone send you a packet from many hops away?), privacy (how will intermediaries be trusted to pass on your data), integrity (how will we ensure no one can DoS via jammer or firewall that targets you.)
We've almost got a solution for the node identity problem (routing) via a distributed DNS like system w/ distributed hash tables (.torrent style) and PGP -- though more efficient encryption is needed to provide TOR style anonymity (this is needed to prevent the above fire-walling issue), and the cert database gets huge quickly, so we need to come up with a self organizing system sans database, using only the web of trust...
The problem with TOR style routing is that you have to know the certs of every node that will be between you and the destination -- If any link goes down, alternates can not take over, the connection must be re-established; Conversely, with a less strict system we can just forward data in the general direction it needs to go, each node can decide the "best" route, and failure of a node results in the next best node being used (next packet -- no resending except from end-points, otherwise the network explodes!).
Once such a network is operational, much like the end of the BBS prevalent days, there will be bridges between the two networks for a long while, sadly, the ISPs have the upper hand in this respect -- it's already installed (see: Windows vs Linux or OSX), they have better speed, reliability (bugs will take a while to work out), and probably pricing (for node hardware)...
I guess you could sell the xbox and use the money to buy games for the PC.
My thoughts exactly... Well, except that I would sell the Xbox for for a RAM upgrade or possibly a few peripherals. Additionally I'd be formatting the drive, installing a VM, then installing Linux and re-installing Win7 (remember to make recovery disks first). IMHO, no one should run Windows outside of a VM. P.S. You can use a Hackintosh VM Image too, if you must, and dual or triple boot instead of a VM if you're brave enough to let MS Windows run directly on the metal -- Yikes!
If you're going to buy a decent laptop, might as well take some free stuff, convert it into a more kick ass computer upgrade, and install a freer OS that won't report your bit-torrent usage to the feds...
So, any one who gets crossed off the hit list becomes known as a "true believer" afterwards...
I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that all the disappeared folk were the outspoken freedom advocates that had actually just been permanently silenced by a coordinated global conspiracy...Perfect opportunity for a cover up, just sayin'.
Hey, that's more believable than a Super Sky Zombie, coming back after thousands of years to take his followers to a magical utopia, where he'll finally marry them all, then subjugate them in service to his father for 1000 years of constant worship...
You know -- If the aliens arrive tomorrow and abscond with a shit load of gullible "volunteers" as their "chosen people", I'll be skipping the ride to eternal slavery camp, no matter how hellish they promise to make our world afterwards. -- Life Free or Die is what I believe in.
P.S. Didn't they make a movie about this already? IIRC: the aliens finally arrived at their destination, Earth. Their purpose: To retrieve the long lost secrets of the most flavorful food in the universe. All the Hispanics were abducted, mind-reamed to discover their collective recipes for Authentic Mexican Cuisine, then returned, unharmed. The world wept without knowing why -- There was a great disturbance in the force due to the psionic-emotive resonances of the aliens, who all joyously celebrated after finally having achieved their holy quest.
Pro-pirate is not pro-liberty. Look up the meaning of the word "pirate" that these guys are trying to emulate.
They are not trying to "emulate" the term Pirate -- The pro-copyright corporations began using the term as a derogatory label (hopefuly having negative connotaion), the term stuck, and so we throw it in their faces.
These are pro-liberty only in the sense that they wish to have more liberty to break the law and enable others to break the law.
The "law" is unjust. Copyright is not required, per constitution, it is allowed, solely for the betterment of society as a whole. It is an outdated and over-broad, in the time that it was first allowed the founding fathers thought thought it should last only around 10 to 14 years. Now, in an era when not only big businesses have copy machines (nearly any one has many), the laws have been twisted to harm society, and extended for TWO GENERATIONS. My lifetime +70 years -- Beyond the life expectancy of my children!
If they actually wish to change the law instead of merely breaking it, then they should boycott the media that is copy protected. That is do not steal the music/games/video but instead refuse to listen/play/watch.
Yes, we want "free" stuff, like our freedom of speech and freedom of expression back. We don't want the restriction of only being able to legally share information that is over 100 years old. Freedom to sing songs publicly and share knowledge and information with our neighbors. The black people of America, and their supporters, had to stand up for their rights when Jim Crow was the LAW. Occasionally this means breaking the fucking unjust, oppressive, ridiculous law -- you dolt! Rosa Parks; Ring any bells!?! (sorry, excuse the rage -- ignorance is abhorrent to me)
As long as they continue acting like common thieves they will get zero respect from the public but if they start a boycott that catches on then they'll start making headway. But this won't happen since the vast majority of pirate party supporters just want the free stuff.
When your civil rights are abused it is your duty to peacefully protest -- What a better way to protest peacefully than to participate in the free sharing of ideas and information with your friends. No one is "stealing" anything. The only thing that has been taken away is the freedom to sing, say, write, or copy anything you want. We allowed aurthors a limited monopoly over their works to keep the greedy publishers in check. Now, the publishers force contracts on the authors or else the work doesn't get published, and these contracts take the rights of the authors and give them to the publishers.
We've tried the civil protest route... Hell, it this case We Have A POLITICAL PARTY, and yet the pockets of the corporations are deeper still than our own. Not participating in the society we helped create is not an option. If you can think of any more peaceful a protest than having a network connection and two computers duplicating 1s and 0s, please, FUCKING LET ME KNOW!
If it weren't for free sharing of ideas human society and the very languages we use that enable us to be more than just emotional animals would not have formed. It is in our very nature to share knowledge and information, to outlaw such things is the very definition of a police state. (Now, there's a fucking term it would do you well to look up!)
1px wide window borders -- for someone with shaky hands these are nearly IMPOSSIBLE to resize (most windows don't include the drag handle).
Nearly all the other non shitty (high contrast) themes it comes with also have 1px wide borders. I get that the border area is destined for a clean look, but does the look have to be tied to the usability? Can't an invisible area around the window provide the drag handle features in a size not dependent on the pixel count of the border? The bug report response says, "no". (I know about the menu option for resize, but that's not a real solution).
I was glad to see shaky-hand assist in the form of Gnome's "drag n drop" threshold -- My neighbor and grandma love this feature; It keeps them from accidentally duplicating or moving files while trying to click them.
The move to Unity further alienates the elderly people in my life -- My grandma is willing to learn a new paradigm, but my neighbor switched to Linux expressly because of the "confusing" new Vista / Win7 UI features. Looks like we'll be "upgrading" to Debian + XFC at this rate.
Meanwhile I wrote a script that uses compiz window positioning to provide the side-by-side window resizing shortcut for them (similar to Win7) -- they would still rather grab the edges of the damn window, and it's very painful to watch them try.
I used to live near the flagship What-a-Burger fast-food restaurant (near their headquarters in Corpus Christi, TX) they have/had free WIFI, and at least 10-15 elderly people meet there in the mornings to chat and do crosswords, check their e-mail, etc over coffee/breakfast. At first I was surprised to be joining conversations with them about the latest computer malware and new websites, applications, privacy policies -- even games, but then I realized: That's how I'll be in the not too distant future, and I have no intention of loosing touch with the world either.
Many elderly people want to participate in today's technology -- They can still learn, you don't have to dumb things down, just add tool-tips or other hints -- It really doesn't take much time to make most apps' UI friendly for them -- Configurable text size, scrolling areas, (full app zoom & panning at worse), instead of a simple static layout -- My programs have a "seniors" mode, that has also come in handy for a Muscular Dystrophy afflicted associate of mine.
P.S. Many elderly people grew up in a time when a button, knob or lever did exactly one thing. The volume knob changes volume, power button turns things on/off -- Some of today's car radios toggle between clock / tune / power / input / on knob push, and spin to change options, software "innovation" can produce less intuitive interfaces. "Soft" buttons that change function depending on what's on the screen are a common source of confusion, in my experience. I've even seen outdoor lighting that toggles between: On, Off, Timed, Off (depending on the number of times you flip the switch) -- confusing to no end for some.
With touch screens & other GUIs: Making the on screen controls visually and/or spatially distinct can help to mitigate the "single function knob" confusion -- (eg: change the color of the UI element depending on its function)
I'm still not entrenched enough into the realms of post-modernism that I think the difference between Real Art and shoddy entertainment can be dealt with by a single word, even if it has a deep and rich semantic structure as "meh".
ORLY? You accidentally the whole rest of my post then? Is The Internet such a serious business?
TL;DR: Way to avoid the issue altogether by pompously focusing only on teh frist "word", heh.
Yeah, just like they "coined" the term "podcast" and only then did podcasting get popular....</sarcasm>
As if I hadn't been making "Web Apps" for the Century previous to their filing... before that, BBS Apps, such as my ASCII Tetris & pong apps, and the "ANSI-APP" series of DOS-to-Win95 era text-GUI programs that ran locally or remotely via my text-only "compositing" window manager (using ANSI + ASCII w/ CP437). Note esp: "ANSI-APP" because 8 (dot) 3 file names were the norm at the time. (We abbreviated fn-every.tng back then.)
Just because the mainstream public is ignoant of a term's use doesn't mean it's not in use and/or a popular term among many.
The fact that Apple was allowed to trademark "podcast" even though that medium was well established without their input should be a clue that the "App Store" trademark is bullshit. After Apple's clone of the iRiver, the iPod, became popular they ran around trademarking all iXxxx and podXxx names, esp. names with any popularity that were already in use. Now they're doing the same thing with App because that's a popular term.
Should this be allowed? No.
Is it proof that the USPTO is full of inept lawyers? Yep.
( For fuck's sake -- The same group that granted Apple the "App Store" trademark also let someone patent swinging on a swing! -- Of course the courts need to be involved, the PTO is full of morons; They're so out of touch with today's world, the only things that exist to them are what's in their databases.)
these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.
You over think things too much -- Simply prefix the fiction with: "In another time, in a place you know not of..."
Once Upon a Future seemed to work pretty well for Star Wars.
I must live in some different world than the rest of you, my world isn't controlled by corporations at all. Not a single corporation, big or small, forces me to do anything at all.
What happened to the rest of you? Are you mistaking your inability to say "no" to things you want as being controlled?
No, we're pointing out our inability to outlaw huge financial contributions from lobbyists to our government officials, who thereafter pass judgment on laws with the effect that corporations benefit most, and individuals none, or negatively. In fact, the limits or the financial contributions were lifted recently...
What happened to you? Are you not living in a country that is controlled primarily by corporate interests irregardless of the amount of money you provide said corporations? Does your voting system actually force the government to obey the beneficial wishes of the society at large instead of selling the public's freedoms to corporations in the form of ever more invasive copyright, patent, and security "protections"? Is there a single place left not enslaved by the immoral mental machinations of oppressive laws and immortal corporations? Do not the corporations force you to live in such a place, also?
Please tell us all the location of your Utopian society; We don't live this way by choice -- it's just that our political pressures don't measure up to the pressures that the corporations can exert.
I think you've mistaken literature for a tech magazine. Same goes for the comment on Snow Crash, which has the added benefit of referring instead to a book that's as innovative as a fantasy novel.
Meh, each to their own. I have a hard time enjoying Science Fiction that is actually futuristic fantasy fiction. Some people just enjoy "hard" sci-fi (somewhat more plausible based on our understanding of the universe) vs run of the mill "I'm just going to make this up because it's neat to think about" sci-fi.
Consider Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" -- This is hard sci-fi. FTWA:
The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality.
"Make believe" Fantasy fiction that happens to involve computers & space technology is not in the same class as "hard" fiction created by someone who would actually research the pertinent fields and try to make the plot more plausible.
Somehow, many people forget that computer science is science... and that there are marked differences between fiction, science fiction, and "hard" science fiction.
IMO: Suppling a setting that's in the future doesn't automatically make something "science fiction" any more than a setting that's in the past makes something a "period piece" ( See: LoTR, also Star Wars... ).
Another thing is that there are layers of abstraction over the raw terminal emulator interface, like readline or curses. The first tries to make editing a command a smaller pain, the other one's role is essentially to turn the terminal emulator running on top of a grid of character cells... back into a grid of character cells.
You have very good ideas... They've been around for a LONG time. Great minds think alike. Ncurses let's you do all of what you're talking about, but you have to write some code to achieve the effects -- the terminal(emulator) just displays text/color/styles, it's up to the application (in this case the command shell, BASH?) to provide the features you're looking for....
With ncurses you can create movable, overlapping windows with "drop shadows" (darken background of bottom & right bordering text), independent scrolling areas, progress bars, animations, simple-music/sound effects, Space Invaders, Brickout, Tetris, etc. all able to interface with the keyboard & mouse (if the terminal supports it: see terminfo). In fact, text based GUIs, and even ANSI art were the norm just prior to the Internet/HTML explosion... For my late 80's / early 90's era BBS I coded up just such a windowed interface (sans mouse input) for "high speed" 14.4Kbps users -- It had features today's Web2.0 sites are just now catching up to (I still have CP437 committed to memory as a result).
Don't worry, you're not the only one who wanted to re-design the system... I wrote half of a terminfo parser (to detect which escapes to use for the features the terminal supports) to achieve similar ideas myself before I discovered ncurses -- Hey, I didn't know any better; I was a newly converted *nix user / MS DOS hold out & reluctant Win user at the time... Now, I've learned that the biggest part of being a "unix geek" is communicating with & hanging out with other "geeks" (esp. online) -- Sometimes the geek network is much better than any other search engine (New-fangled "social networks" have just recently begun to capitalize on these effects).
Well, the idea is to take our 80x25 grid of characters and provide a completely raw, low-level API to it. API like, "put glyph 0x41 in position 0,0". curses can do that, but it's two unnecessary layers of abstraction, so better just take an X terminal emulator, rip out all the terminal emulation code, and provide THAT api over it. Now, the second step is to let a library manage this area - if you want to emulate a VT100, just put a VT100 widget in there. If you want to run a curses-based program, it would make sense to port ncurses to use this backend. But the most interesting thing (IMHO) is the new (old) text user interface that I've conceived.
Well... Get to Coding! (just kidding, you actually don't have to). However, if you did start out on such a project (as I did) you would realize why there are so many messed up layers -- it's for backwards / forwards / cross-terminal compatibility. I was a die-hard DOS coder, I feel your pain -- My DOS text GUI applications had access to the text memory buffer: Every other byte was a FG/BGcolor&blink byte, with character bytes interleaved (ASCII +cp437), and it was simple. A breeze to work with, but it wasn't very cross platform.
Perhaps you would like to check out GNU Screen? (Since it does just about everything you mentioned).
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple charact
Yeah, there definatey seems to be something wrong with the dev, here. He seems inconsistent if not completely delusional.
Read some of the comments on TFA. He brags about having years of UNIX admin experience, but doesn't seem to grasp core concepts... why certain commands output the way they do and how that output is useful in practical application.
No. You are WRONG. I think (hope) the dev is just making this whole project as a humorous joke...
Look closely, at TFA. Notice anything, that hints at this very premise? No? Take a real good look at the last picture in the "Pipes" section. (Just above "Synchronous Interaction" section). Pay close attention to the highly revered JSON object source code...
I wrote a (T)FTP server that after 6 trys gives the user a 6 minute delay; after another 10 tries another delay (15 minutes) is applied, but after 20 to 30 (psedo- random) total failed attempts in one day, the user (irregardless of username) is given what seems like access to the system. They can list a limited set of small "files and directories", although none actually exist, and all simulated file contents are mundane, boring, and severely rate limited.
Only one fake "guest" account is allowed at a time, any new intruders gaining access cause the previous guest connection to disconnect.
I've resisted removing the "honeypot" since I've observed several interesting effects due to this "feature":
Users that will not contact the admin or request a new password, and instead keep trying will eventually "gain access"; Upon finding their files missing, will then contact the admin. "Oh, this again? We could use more funding for better servers, oh well. I'll have it fixed in a jiffy, but you'll have to select a new password again, sorry."
The time delays slow down brute force attacks considerably, many attackers will tune their scripts to avoid triggering the blockage (by adding delays to their scripts).
Most intruders will get bored and quickly stop showing up.
Network resource consumption due to a brute force attack is mitigated; Most attack scripts stop when they gain access.
Some attack bots will just recursively scrape the meager "contents", and quickly move on to another target.
Log contains less failed attempt lines -- additionally I can just grep for "Dummy FTP Access Granted to..." to determine offending IP ranges or usernames.
Attackers that reason all accounts have shitty/same passwords, will "hack" a few accounts, then determine that no-one uses the server and move along.
I've used fuzzing and several attack toolkits to test the system's security (as well as peer review), and our current version also supports SFTP (which many users have transitioned to over the years).
May is Zombie Awareness Month.
( Well, actually, there are many unofficial dates set, so I observer all of them! )
Zombie Awareness Day is a great time to check your friends and family for bite marks and other tell tale "infected" behavior, and to review & revise your Zombie Plan (Think Fire Escape Plan -- Except that you're prepared to keep running for months after you safely exit the premises).
Which brings me to my next point: It's time to make sure you have your Zombie Preparedness Kit in order -- It's basically a Hurricane or Earthquake preparedness kit, with more shotguns and shells.
Remember -- "Shoot it in the head, it stays dead.", and have a Happy Zombie Awareness Month!
So it's an "emulator" you say? It "simulates" a "hardware device".
Would not another word for this be: "Virtual Machine"? Have they cleared this with Oracle, or did NVIDIA just get caught with their pants down? (stroking their e-peen)
How are you getting around VMWare's patent on saving and restoring a VM state? Clearly you'll want to do that to enable debugging of your soft-hardware. (Even though many VMs could do that long before the patent was applied for -- My old Lisp machine emulator did).
Inquiring minds want to know... specifically, what do I have to do so that the new VM based languages (like Java/Davlik or Lua?!) don't infringe any VM software patents? (Or are you taking the same advice my lawyer gave me? "Ignore the patents, foreknowledge makes infringement penalties greater. If you can stay under the radar by using different terminology long enough to become successful, we can negotiate a (cross) licensing deal.")
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, besides, it's not like Google was trying to hide the fact they are crawling any Internet site -- The user agent is:
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Many sites actually show more information if they detect the Google bot to increase their search rankings.
Later, If you click the search listing and can't see what the bot saw, in most cases, it's not because the search database is out of date, it's because of a pay/register wall bait & switch. Protip: Firefox plugin User Agent Switcher will sometimes let you in with the "right" user agent (if the site doesn't also check IP addresses).
My point is that Google is distributed -- they could hit a site from a different IP range and use a different User Agent string (ie pretend to be Chrome or FF), to hide their identity but they are not... (This is actually how Google detects bait and switch type links).
It's hard to fault a web crawler for crawling the web. This is especially true in Facebook's case since Facebook promotes all those external links back to Facebook pages via "like this" and "follow us on Facebook" links.
When you find the mouse trap has sprung, do you complain that the bait is gone?
"Java" could refer to Coffee indicating a complete lack of knowledge about software which aligns well with the post
Are you shitting me!? Java Man is FAMOUS! Everyone knows who he is, even has a Wikipedia page!
There is a bit of belly button lint that is valued at over $900 nonillion dollars! That's more money than there is in the world, many times over! I would say her naval lint is priceless, but I may consider letting someone else farm my girlfriend's belly button, If they transfered the world's wealth to me, many times over (to have destroyed -- that shit's evil, and the world would just make more money).
Remember when Yahoo's stock value jumped because MS tried to buy them? Did you notice how much better Yahoo's service was during this time? Remember how their stock price fell drastically after the MS buy-out fell through? Remember how Yahoo's service just turned to utter shit at the same time? No? Right, because it stayed the same. These companies stock prices and Market Caps mean jack shit... it's all decimal numbers attached to feelings -- if more people feel good about having a larger number of a company's stock, then it's "worth" more, irregardless of the actual value of the products and services the companies make... It's all based on emotions! Feelings!!!
Now, say you're AT&T. Your stock price is worth X because of your profit and loss statement. If you spend some profit to make your company worth more -- improved speeds and reliability -- then your stock price will fall because the investors see that you are not bringing in as much profit.
Yes yes, there are Analysts, this is an over-simplification, the actual value does weigh in somewhat, but the feelings do more so -- This really does hold true in most cases. Ergo, one reason the US has shitty Internet is because of the funny-money market.
Granted, I feel that MS should be worth less than IBM, even though I haven't seen a single IBM brand device anywhere in my house for years... Even though I don't like or own Apple products, I feel that they should be worth more than MS because their fanbois are loud.
Is it any wonder that the feeling based values relate directly to the public's feelings and thus directly are reflected in the stock market?
How are you feeling about the banking/mortgage industry? About as well as they are doing, eh? Wonder why that is... It's a shame we didn't learn our lesson about the funny-money market the first time... I once showed that my neighbor has spent enough money playing the lottery to have purchased things they talk about buying if they win -- C'est la vie, people are dumb.
Physics and chemistry didn't evolve; they sprang into existence fully formed. (Mankind's understanding of them is continually advancing, but the necessary formulas haven't changed since the Big Bang.)
Oops -- there were no "formulas" around until we thinking beings discovered a way to describe the interactions we were seeing. Physics and chemistry did evolve as we had to create and refine them, in reality there is no such thing as chemistry or physics -- these are just mental tools we have created to help us predict future events... it is not really how things happen, even if the happenings appear similar to our predictions, it is only because we choose to classify them as such.
There were clearly things happening long before we happened, and there will never be a precise or fast enough tool to completely and accurately predict any event since a fully described "formula" for complete accurate prediction of events would also include the process by which it is currently being described and evaluated -- the description of which affects the description itself, infinitely.
Only thinking beings try to predict what will happen -- colliding asteroids don't do predictions -- the universe has no need for such a thing: Shit Happens the way it is happening and that's the universe's take on the whole situation.
Science hasn't been around forever, it takes a rational thinking mind to apply the Scientific method -- thus, unless you believe the universe thinks for itself, we brought science to our corner of the Universe. We discovered the relations between the concept of numbers and units and created Math. The universe has no need for numbers -- "How many apples will there be if I eat one of your three?" At the fundamental level this has no real meaning, there is no "apple" -- that is a classification that humans invented for that instance of particularly classified space/time and energy state -- Apples and Oranges and Orangutans are the same things to the universe -- this bunch of twists and knots of space/time energy waves interacts with that bunch over there the way they will, and they have, and are about to some more. The universe becomes the result of me eating the apple, and were I not going to have eaten it, it would have become the state of you having the same you already had.
The very existence of the universe is like the wake of a pebble in a pond. Unaware that it is propagating and ultimately its wave energy is normalizing, it is what it is, and nothing more -- The Universe is so very much like this -- the waves/energies produced by the big bang are just a bit more complex than the wake of the pebble, but the principal is the same. We are part of this energy conversion and fluctuation process -- the pebble's waves reflect upon themselves and realize, "Ooh, isn't all this neat?", and then we are gone, taking our classification systems and prediction tools with us.
The universe does not say, these two groups of space/time energy shall act like "apples", it has no concept of "similarity", it can not differentiate any matter from any other matter, and it treats all parts of itself the same. Some of what we call matter seems to act differently than other classifications we have made of matter, but to the universe it is all the same. All energy and space/time combinations are unique from any other -- We may recognize that some matter and set of potential energies (circumstances) are similar to some other event, but not the Universe. We may classify and attempt to make predictions based on prior events, but the Universe does not.
Thus: A Computer Scientist, is just a more precise classification of Scientist that we have created. Scientists that study primarily Evolution, could then be called Evolutionary Scientists, even though they are Biologists, for the same reason a Scientist studying primarily Applied Computerized Mathematics could be called a Computer Scientist even though they are also Mathematicians.
In a way we are the un
Seriously, I know it may sound a bit selfish, but here in Texas is where the curriculum of much of the nation is decided due to our huge purchasing power of school books. The publishers do not bend to the will of the smaller states as readily, and they must buy the books that are available from these publishers (personally, give me reprints from the 50s -- they're not nearly as dumbed down). California gets it, last I heard they were banning books that had the Texas curriculum in them.
The problem is that here in Texas religious zealots are pushing to get "intelligent design" taught instead of the Science of evolution; Currently I.D. is being pushed as an alternative, with the hope that teachers can be found that will only want to teach one alternative -- I.D.
The children will not learn without exposure to the scientific information -- I used only MS OSs since MS DOS 3.1 because I did not know about Linux! No one was there to teach me that I had other options than MacOS or Windows.
Texas is the battleground that must be won to keep evolution in many schools across the country.
A huge problem is that many true I.D. believers can not be reasoned with, many are irrational and have no concept of science.
I once showed one of these fundamentalists a well known experiment I was running where each generation of mouse, at 4 weeks old (the brink of maturity for this breed), I put through a chute and if the mouse's tail got caught by the small rear sliding door, I would remove that mouse from the gene pool into a separate habitat. Each generation I shortened the measuring cell's length a bit.
I pointed to the mice in the two different environments and said: "You see -- These mice with the long tails came from the same parents as these mice over here with no tails. Because of the chute's environmental pressure, the mice evolved to be a tailless breed. It was more genetically advantageous for mature mice to have shorter tails here, while there the mice were under no such constraint.
Their response was that I was the intelligent designer -- I argued that it was only a demonstration, if one intelligently imposed environmental pressure could cause a change in the species, then other natural environmental pressures could also have effects that change a species.
They said, "God would be providing such natural pressures." -- I said, "Eureka! So, you agree -- Evolution exists, and may be the very tool your God used to make the variety of species, and that He was smart enough to give his creatures adaptability so they could survive environmental changes!"
They replied: "That is not what The Bible says, and therefore, that is not the truth. I still don't see why your theory of evolution should be taught in schools." I replied, "For the same reason we teach the theory of gravity!", and walked away.
You can't win a logical argument with a fundamentalist -- even if they agree with you, they still disagree on principal.
I hope that the they are just warming up with the "Darwin Day Road Show", so it doesn't seem like an attack at the very heart of the issue, but this is what must happen. Please come to Texas!
P.S. Teach religion in school, fine I don't care -- but just don't remove the Science!
TL;DR: Phhcht -- Houston, we have a fucking problem! We're screwing ourselves out of reasonable people; Over.
According to US copyright law, when you perform a work for hire, such as a painting or a tattoo, the work becomes the property of the person the work is performed for unless otherwise agreed upon.
So the work belonged to Tyson, not the artist at that point (unless they agreed otherwise). And if Tyson gave permission for it to be used, then there is no problem.
Brilliant! I'm getting a tatoo with a flag and a half eaten apple surrounded by a hex code on my ass so I can moon a whole court room full of copyright and trademark litigators when Sony, MS and Apple sue me!
Most of the comments before this one are a good example of the attitude of your average IT person toward this whole "personal equipment" thing.
Me, I work at a different company, where we decided to treat employees like responsible adults. We make sure people know how to secure their equipment and, if they want (and usually they do), we do it for them.
[...]
It's seemed to work pretty well for us, with no noticeable virus outbreaks. It supports that whole "our employees are our biggest asset" stuff that most companies just spout but never believe. In fact, it really comes down to that point -- IT people (much like HR people, BTW) mostly consider employees threat vectors, rather than colleagues. Here? It's the other way. And it seems to work pretty well.
This will work for a while, but there is a reason that the average IT person has the ideas that they do -- It's from experience. If you stay small and are never the target of any more sophisticated attack than a botnet, or spam rootkit, everything will be fine -- those are not threats. I'd rather have every machine in the company be spouting spam and displaying pop-ups about viagra than to have just one tech-savvy disgruntled employee, or capable spear-fisherman dropping zero day exploits on any OS, breaching our customer's confidential information.
If you have sensitive customer data to worry about, it's a whole different ball-game than if you just make stuff -- If you work with toxins or radioactivity, even sewage treatment, it only takes one small slip-up to cause unimaginable damage...
Seriously -- I bet you're one of the same people that's looking down your nose at Sony thinking, "How could they be so dumb!" It can happen to you. When it does -- you have been warned, by an ex-experienced IT person. (work for myself now, hint: "CUSTOMERS are my biggest asset.", any other hogwash is just that.
So... the Firewall stores allowed IP addresses in a table structure, lets say an AVL/RedBlack tree or a hash table. You certainly don't want every outbound connection (hole you punch) in the firewall to be permanent. So, why not add a time stamp, and if it remains unused for a long enough period of time, you remove that IP rule?
You don't want to have to constantly run a background thread that scans the table for expired entries -- That would be needlessly wasteful! Instead, why don't we look at the nodes while we're traversing the tree or hash looking for a match to determine if a packet should be blocked or allowed, and then just remove any expired rules we come across!
In a hash table, collisions (two different addresses mapping to the same bucket) are frequently resolved by storing a pointer to a linked list in the bucket instead of just one address. Since you'll occasionally be iterating across more than one IP rule, you can remove expired rules as you do so -- similar to the way you would for tree traversal.
Obvious, right? I mean... I don't see why no one figured this out a long time ago!
Wait... wait... You're probably thinking of responding with something along the lines of: "No shit, you dumbass, that's how it's done already." I know; I know... that's my point -- That's the way my game servers have been doing things since the early 90s.
Well, there's just one catch -- That's illegal; It can be patent infringing. Remember that patent suit brought against Google by Bedrock claiming that their use of Linux infringes a patent, and that all of Linux may be infringing?
Patent 5,893,120 -- "methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data."
The court found Google to be in violation. Of course the patent should never have been granted... Any professional skilled in the art of hash tables, and familiar with the concept of a stateful firewall will arrive at this solution... (please dissolve the PTO, it's broken, okay?)
So -- I hope Red Hat/Fedora is using a Red-Black tree or AVL tree -- instead of a Hash... I would check, but honestly, I'm a lazy Debian kind of guy.
How about the Open Source crowd figuring a way to deliver broadband for free or close to free? Why not!
It's hard to do -- I've made a few experimental wireless mesh networks using Linux firmware on a bunch of wireless routers. We're working on it, but really, no one with much power/money wants us to succeed...
There are many problems to overcome -- the main three problems are: latency (many small hops over low powered wireless -- need to use longer range, but those frequencies are strictly regulated), congestion (limited available frequency ranges -- cooperation required for a "rolling" frequency allocation, easy to disrupt), but mostly the problem is the fact that you want something totally different that what we can really offer.
The previous stated problem is better defined as such: You want "Broadband Internet" -- which is far more a specific requirement than "Broadband Network"; The former requires a choke point whereby lots of distributed traffic enters and leaves a hard-line connected to the Internet (at no cost!?!), the latter does not have the requirement but has to iron out many many issues before commercial entities will get on board.
One big problem is adoption. Will you be willing to give up your current ISP, and the entire Web it allows you to access? If not, will you be willing to foot the bill for a node so that the free (as in freedom) network can operate along side, and in addition to your current ISP hardware? If so, will you be willing to bridge the two, despite rediculous "end user" threats (when you're really an ISP)? If not, will you publish content on the free net with a license that allows everyone to copy it infinitely?
My mesh network had adequate speed for most uses (email, chat, voip), but streaming HD video did not scale well (100+ routers over 4 square blocks servicing approx. 80 "homes") -- no caching servers implemented yet... (do you want to host data that's not yours? If so, can you get the copyright license to do so? If so can everyone get that license for free? -- copyright law has no place in modern technology, we must copy everything all the time, and we need the legal restrictions lifted so that we can! Note: ISP routers already to this with indemnity, but our distributed "torrent" like network will face legal threats.)
There has to be a global or at least national solution to connectivity (how easy will it be to buy & install a node/host), identity (how will someone send you a packet from many hops away?), privacy (how will intermediaries be trusted to pass on your data), integrity (how will we ensure no one can DoS via jammer or firewall that targets you.)
We've almost got a solution for the node identity problem (routing) via a distributed DNS like system w/ distributed hash tables (.torrent style) and PGP -- though more efficient encryption is needed to provide TOR style anonymity (this is needed to prevent the above fire-walling issue), and the cert database gets huge quickly, so we need to come up with a self organizing system sans database, using only the web of trust...
The problem with TOR style routing is that you have to know the certs of every node that will be between you and the destination -- If any link goes down, alternates can not take over, the connection must be re-established; Conversely, with a less strict system we can just forward data in the general direction it needs to go, each node can decide the "best" route, and failure of a node results in the next best node being used (next packet -- no resending except from end-points, otherwise the network explodes!).
Once such a network is operational, much like the end of the BBS prevalent days, there will be bridges between the two networks for a long while, sadly, the ISPs have the upper hand in this respect -- it's already installed (see: Windows vs Linux or OSX), they have better speed, reliability (bugs will take a while to work out), and probably pricing (for node hardware)...
I guess you could sell the xbox and use the money to buy games for the PC.
My thoughts exactly... Well, except that I would sell the Xbox for for a RAM upgrade or possibly a few peripherals. Additionally I'd be formatting the drive, installing a VM, then installing Linux and re-installing Win7 (remember to make recovery disks first). IMHO, no one should run Windows outside of a VM. P.S. You can use a Hackintosh VM Image too, if you must, and dual or triple boot instead of a VM if you're brave enough to let MS Windows run directly on the metal -- Yikes!
If you're going to buy a decent laptop, might as well take some free stuff, convert it into a more kick ass computer upgrade, and install a freer OS that won't report your bit-torrent usage to the feds...
So, any one who gets crossed off the hit list becomes known as a "true believer" afterwards...
I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that all the disappeared folk were the outspoken freedom advocates that had actually just been permanently silenced by a coordinated global conspiracy...Perfect opportunity for a cover up, just sayin'.
Hey, that's more believable than a Super Sky Zombie, coming back after thousands of years to take his followers to a magical utopia, where he'll finally marry them all, then subjugate them in service to his father for 1000 years of constant worship...
You know -- If the aliens arrive tomorrow and abscond with a shit load of gullible "volunteers" as their "chosen people", I'll be skipping the ride to eternal slavery camp, no matter how hellish they promise to make our world afterwards. -- Life Free or Die is what I believe in.
P.S. Didn't they make a movie about this already? IIRC: the aliens finally arrived at their destination, Earth. Their purpose: To retrieve the long lost secrets of the most flavorful food in the universe. All the Hispanics were abducted, mind-reamed to discover their collective recipes for Authentic Mexican Cuisine, then returned, unharmed. The world wept without knowing why -- There was a great disturbance in the force due to the psionic-emotive resonances of the aliens, who all joyously celebrated after finally having achieved their holy quest.
Pro-pirate is not pro-liberty. Look up the meaning of the word "pirate" that these guys are trying to emulate.
They are not trying to "emulate" the term Pirate -- The pro-copyright corporations began using the term as a derogatory label (hopefuly having negative connotaion), the term stuck, and so we throw it in their faces.
These are pro-liberty only in the sense that they wish to have more liberty to break the law and enable others to break the law.
The "law" is unjust. Copyright is not required, per constitution, it is allowed, solely for the betterment of society as a whole. It is an outdated and over-broad, in the time that it was first allowed the founding fathers thought thought it should last only around 10 to 14 years. Now, in an era when not only big businesses have copy machines (nearly any one has many), the laws have been twisted to harm society, and extended for TWO GENERATIONS. My lifetime +70 years -- Beyond the life expectancy of my children!
If they actually wish to change the law instead of merely breaking it, then they should boycott the media that is copy protected. That is do not steal the music/games/video but instead refuse to listen/play/watch.
Yes, we want "free" stuff, like our freedom of speech and freedom of expression back. We don't want the restriction of only being able to legally share information that is over 100 years old. Freedom to sing songs publicly and share knowledge and information with our neighbors. The black people of America, and their supporters, had to stand up for their rights when Jim Crow was the LAW. Occasionally this means breaking the fucking unjust, oppressive, ridiculous law -- you dolt! Rosa Parks; Ring any bells!?! (sorry, excuse the rage -- ignorance is abhorrent to me)
As long as they continue acting like common thieves they will get zero respect from the public but if they start a boycott that catches on then they'll start making headway. But this won't happen since the vast majority of pirate party supporters just want the free stuff.
When your civil rights are abused it is your duty to peacefully protest -- What a better way to protest peacefully than to participate in the free sharing of ideas and information with your friends. No one is "stealing" anything. The only thing that has been taken away is the freedom to sing, say, write, or copy anything you want. We allowed aurthors a limited monopoly over their works to keep the greedy publishers in check. Now, the publishers force contracts on the authors or else the work doesn't get published, and these contracts take the rights of the authors and give them to the publishers.
We've tried the civil protest route... Hell, it this case We Have A POLITICAL PARTY, and yet the pockets of the corporations are deeper still than our own. Not participating in the society we helped create is not an option. If you can think of any more peaceful a protest than having a network connection and two computers duplicating 1s and 0s, please, FUCKING LET ME KNOW!
If it weren't for free sharing of ideas human society and the very languages we use that enable us to be more than just emotional animals would not have formed. It is in our very nature to share knowledge and information, to outlaw such things is the very definition of a police state. (Now, there's a fucking term it would do you well to look up!)
1px wide window borders -- for someone with shaky hands these are nearly IMPOSSIBLE to resize (most windows don't include the drag handle).
Nearly all the other non shitty (high contrast) themes it comes with also have 1px wide borders. I get that the border area is destined for a clean look, but does the look have to be tied to the usability? Can't an invisible area around the window provide the drag handle features in a size not dependent on the pixel count of the border? The bug report response says, "no". (I know about the menu option for resize, but that's not a real solution).
I was glad to see shaky-hand assist in the form of Gnome's "drag n drop" threshold -- My neighbor and grandma love this feature; It keeps them from accidentally duplicating or moving files while trying to click them.
The move to Unity further alienates the elderly people in my life -- My grandma is willing to learn a new paradigm, but my neighbor switched to Linux expressly because of the "confusing" new Vista / Win7 UI features. Looks like we'll be "upgrading" to Debian + XFC at this rate.
Meanwhile I wrote a script that uses compiz window positioning to provide the side-by-side window resizing shortcut for them (similar to Win7) -- they would still rather grab the edges of the damn window, and it's very painful to watch them try.
I used to live near the flagship What-a-Burger fast-food restaurant (near their headquarters in Corpus Christi, TX) they have/had free WIFI, and at least 10-15 elderly people meet there in the mornings to chat and do crosswords, check their e-mail, etc over coffee/breakfast. At first I was surprised to be joining conversations with them about the latest computer malware and new websites, applications, privacy policies -- even games, but then I realized: That's how I'll be in the not too distant future, and I have no intention of loosing touch with the world either.
Many elderly people want to participate in today's technology -- They can still learn, you don't have to dumb things down, just add tool-tips or other hints -- It really doesn't take much time to make most apps' UI friendly for them -- Configurable text size, scrolling areas, (full app zoom & panning at worse), instead of a simple static layout -- My programs have a "seniors" mode, that has also come in handy for a Muscular Dystrophy afflicted associate of mine.
P.S. Many elderly people grew up in a time when a button, knob or lever did exactly one thing. The volume knob changes volume, power button turns things on/off -- Some of today's car radios toggle between clock / tune / power / input / on knob push, and spin to change options, software "innovation" can produce less intuitive interfaces. "Soft" buttons that change function depending on what's on the screen are a common source of confusion, in my experience. I've even seen outdoor lighting that toggles between: On, Off, Timed, Off (depending on the number of times you flip the switch) -- confusing to no end for some.
With touch screens & other GUIs: Making the on screen controls visually and/or spatially distinct can help to mitigate the "single function knob" confusion -- (eg: change the color of the UI element depending on its function)
I'm still not entrenched enough into the realms of post-modernism that I think the difference between Real Art and shoddy entertainment can be dealt with by a single word, even if it has a deep and rich semantic structure as "meh".
ORLY? You accidentally the whole rest of my post then? Is The Internet such a serious business?
TL;DR: Way to avoid the issue altogether by pompously focusing only on teh frist "word", heh.
Then Apple starts using Apps, coins the App Store
Yeah, just like they "coined" the term "podcast" and only then did podcasting get popular....</sarcasm>
As if I hadn't been making "Web Apps" for the Century previous to their filing... before that, BBS Apps, such as my ASCII Tetris & pong apps, and the "ANSI-APP" series of DOS-to-Win95 era text-GUI programs that ran locally or remotely via my text-only "compositing" window manager (using ANSI + ASCII w/ CP437). Note esp: "ANSI-APP" because 8 (dot) 3 file names were the norm at the time. (We abbreviated fn-every.tng back then.)
Just because the mainstream public is ignoant of a term's use doesn't mean it's not in use and/or a popular term among many.
The fact that Apple was allowed to trademark "podcast" even though that medium was well established without their input should be a clue that the "App Store" trademark is bullshit. After Apple's clone of the iRiver, the iPod, became popular they ran around trademarking all iXxxx and podXxx names, esp. names with any popularity that were already in use. Now they're doing the same thing with App because that's a popular term.
Should this be allowed? No.
Is it proof that the USPTO is full of inept lawyers? Yep.
( For fuck's sake -- The same group that granted Apple the "App Store" trademark also let someone patent swinging on a swing! -- Of course the courts need to be involved, the PTO is full of morons; They're so out of touch with today's world, the only things that exist to them are what's in their databases.)
"... a new $2 billion device ... Two robotic arms worked in tandem to lift the 15,251-pound instrument,"
They're delivering science and wall-street news all at once. Translation:
New Space Station attachment deployed.
Also, the US dollar has attained an all-time low of 131138.94 to one vs the British pound.
You should know that both NASA and the US Military use SI units; The only ones left using the crappy empirical units are the general public...
FTWA
The [SI] system has been nearly globally adopted. Three principal exceptions are Myanmar (Burma), Liberia, and the United States.
This is clearly a ploy to oppress the common folk with antiquated and difficult to use measures.
I don't know about you, but I purchased a lot of expensive gear to explicitly inhibit the propagation of Thunderbolt to my PCs.
Even more dangerous is allowing Thunderbolt to connect to my PCs directly from the cloud (hence, the newly installed lightning rod).
these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.
You over think things too much -- Simply prefix the fiction with: "In another time, in a place you know not of..."
Once Upon a Future seemed to work pretty well for Star Wars.
I must live in some different world than the rest of you, my world isn't controlled by corporations at all. Not a single corporation, big or small, forces me to do anything at all.
What happened to the rest of you? Are you mistaking your inability to say "no" to things you want as being controlled?
No, we're pointing out our inability to outlaw huge financial contributions from lobbyists to our government officials, who thereafter pass judgment on laws with the effect that corporations benefit most, and individuals none, or negatively. In fact, the limits or the financial contributions were lifted recently...
What happened to you? Are you not living in a country that is controlled primarily by corporate interests irregardless of the amount of money you provide said corporations? Does your voting system actually force the government to obey the beneficial wishes of the society at large instead of selling the public's freedoms to corporations in the form of ever more invasive copyright, patent, and security "protections"? Is there a single place left not enslaved by the immoral mental machinations of oppressive laws and immortal corporations? Do not the corporations force you to live in such a place, also?
Please tell us all the location of your Utopian society; We don't live this way by choice -- it's just that our political pressures don't measure up to the pressures that the corporations can exert.
I think you've mistaken literature for a tech magazine. Same goes for the comment on Snow Crash, which has the added benefit of referring instead to a book that's as innovative as a fantasy novel.
Meh, each to their own. I have a hard time enjoying Science Fiction that is actually futuristic fantasy fiction. Some people just enjoy "hard" sci-fi (somewhat more plausible based on our understanding of the universe) vs run of the mill "I'm just going to make this up because it's neat to think about" sci-fi.
Consider Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" -- This is hard sci-fi.
FTWA:
The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the comparative lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality.
"Make believe" Fantasy fiction that happens to involve computers & space technology is not in the same class as "hard" fiction created by someone who would actually research the pertinent fields and try to make the plot more plausible.
Somehow, many people forget that computer science is science... and that there are marked differences between fiction, science fiction, and "hard" science fiction.
IMO: Suppling a setting that's in the future doesn't automatically make something "science fiction" any more than a setting that's in the past makes something a "period piece" ( See: LoTR, also Star Wars... ).
Another thing is that there are layers of abstraction over the raw terminal emulator interface, like readline or curses. The first tries to make editing a command a smaller pain, the other one's role is essentially to turn the terminal emulator running on top of a grid of character cells... back into a grid of character cells.
You have very good ideas... They've been around for a LONG time. Great minds think alike. Ncurses let's you do all of what you're talking about, but you have to write some code to achieve the effects -- the terminal(emulator) just displays text/color/styles, it's up to the application (in this case the command shell, BASH?) to provide the features you're looking for....
With ncurses you can create movable, overlapping windows with "drop shadows" (darken background of bottom & right bordering text), independent scrolling areas, progress bars, animations, simple-music/sound effects, Space Invaders, Brickout, Tetris, etc. all able to interface with the keyboard & mouse (if the terminal supports it: see terminfo). In fact, text based GUIs, and even ANSI art were the norm just prior to the Internet/HTML explosion... For my late 80's / early 90's era BBS I coded up just such a windowed interface (sans mouse input) for "high speed" 14.4Kbps users -- It had features today's Web2.0 sites are just now catching up to (I still have CP437 committed to memory as a result).
Don't worry, you're not the only one who wanted to re-design the system... I wrote half of a terminfo parser (to detect which escapes to use for the features the terminal supports) to achieve similar ideas myself before I discovered ncurses -- Hey, I didn't know any better; I was a newly converted *nix user / MS DOS hold out & reluctant Win user at the time... Now, I've learned that the biggest part of being a "unix geek" is communicating with & hanging out with other "geeks" (esp. online) -- Sometimes the geek network is much better than any other search engine (New-fangled "social networks" have just recently begun to capitalize on these effects).
Well, the idea is to take our 80x25 grid of characters and provide a completely raw, low-level API to it. API like, "put glyph 0x41 in position 0,0". curses can do that, but it's two unnecessary layers of abstraction, so better just take an X terminal emulator, rip out all the terminal emulation code, and provide THAT api over it. Now, the second step is to let a library manage this area - if you want to emulate a VT100, just put a VT100 widget in there. If you want to run a curses-based program, it would make sense to port ncurses to use this backend. But the most interesting thing (IMHO) is the new (old) text user interface that I've conceived.
Well... Get to Coding! (just kidding, you actually don't have to). However, if you did start out on such a project (as I did) you would realize why there are so many messed up layers -- it's for backwards / forwards / cross-terminal compatibility. I was a die-hard DOS coder, I feel your pain -- My DOS text GUI applications had access to the text memory buffer: Every other byte was a FG/BGcolor&blink byte, with character bytes interleaved (ASCII +cp437), and it was simple. A breeze to work with, but it wasn't very cross platform.
Perhaps you would like to check out GNU Screen? (Since it does just about everything you mentioned).
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple charact
Yeah, there definatey seems to be something wrong with the dev, here. He seems inconsistent if not completely delusional.
Read some of the comments on TFA. He brags about having years of UNIX admin experience, but doesn't seem to grasp core concepts... why certain commands output the way they do and how that output is useful in practical application.
No. You are WRONG. I think (hope) the dev is just making this whole project as a humorous joke...
Look closely, at TFA. Notice anything, that hints at this very premise? No? Take a real good look at the last picture in the "Pipes" section. (Just above "Synchronous Interaction" section). Pay close attention to the highly revered JSON object source code...
{
"foo": "bar",
"meh": "teh",
"lol": "wai",
"list": [ { "lol": "lulz", "fail": "json" } , "wtf" ]
}
Yes...
Meh, LoL wai? LoL, lulz. Fail JSON, WTF
indeed.
I wrote a (T)FTP server that after 6 trys gives the user a 6 minute delay; after another 10 tries another delay (15 minutes) is applied, but after 20 to 30 (psedo- random) total failed attempts in one day, the user (irregardless of username) is given what seems like access to the system. They can list a limited set of small "files and directories", although none actually exist, and all simulated file contents are mundane, boring, and severely rate limited.
Only one fake "guest" account is allowed at a time, any new intruders gaining access cause the previous guest connection to disconnect.
I've resisted removing the "honeypot" since I've observed several interesting effects due to this "feature":
"Oh, this again? We could use more funding for better servers, oh well. I'll have it fixed in a jiffy, but you'll have to select a new password again, sorry."
I've used fuzzing and several attack toolkits to test the system's security (as well as peer review), and our current version also supports SFTP (which many users have transitioned to over the years).
May is Zombie Awareness Month.
( Well, actually, there are many unofficial dates set, so I observer all of them! )
Zombie Awareness Day is a great time to check your friends and family for bite marks and other tell tale "infected" behavior, and to review & revise your Zombie Plan (Think Fire Escape Plan -- Except that you're prepared to keep running for months after you safely exit the premises).
Which brings me to my next point: It's time to make sure you have your Zombie Preparedness Kit in order -- It's basically a Hurricane or Earthquake preparedness kit, with more shotguns and shells.
Remember -- "Shoot it in the head, it stays dead.", and have a Happy Zombie Awareness Month!
So it's an "emulator" you say? It "simulates" a "hardware device".
Would not another word for this be: "Virtual Machine"? Have they cleared this with Oracle, or did NVIDIA just get caught with their pants down? (stroking their e-peen)
How are you getting around VMWare's patent on saving and restoring a VM state? Clearly you'll want to do that to enable debugging of your soft-hardware. (Even though many VMs could do that long before the patent was applied for -- My old Lisp machine emulator did).
Inquiring minds want to know... specifically, what do I have to do so that the new VM based languages (like Java/Davlik or Lua?!) don't infringe any VM software patents? (Or are you taking the same advice my lawyer gave me? "Ignore the patents, foreknowledge makes infringement penalties greater. If you can stay under the radar by using different terminology long enough to become successful, we can negotiate a (cross) licensing deal.")
Software Patents Bad. Even For Hardware Company.