This really shouldn't have an effect on religion, at least not Christianity. Certain interpretations of Genesis aside, the Bible is largely silent on the mechanics of creation of the universe, and is concerned only with our particular part of it. Most of the confusion between fundamentalists and scientists result from trying to read a very ancient Hebrew text through the eyes of post-enlightenment readers, and not getting the symbolic importance of what is being written.
Now this makes me feel warm and fuzzy on a dreary Tuesday Morning. Although Bill Gates' popluarity would have been best served to go on Star Trek:TNG as a borg, the next best thing he can do to is to actually be polite to the open source crowd for a change. True, most of us want to crush the Microsoft juggernaut under the heels of the Penguin, interoperability between Microsoft and *nix is for the most part a very good thing. I've been happily using Linux as my main platform since 1998, but not everybody is in love with the command line.
Of course, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so I am sure they will find some way to screw this up.
Good point. I would be far more likely to give $100 to fund the Beagle 3 mission to Mars than to pay for this. It's not that the launch tower isn't a monument to human history, but that amount of money could do so much more.
The big problem that the vast majority of the public are not excited by space travel. You aren't going to get people excited by maintaining a scaffold. I like the e-bay idea. Auction off small pieces encased in Lucite, and use the money to fund a rover on the Moon. THAT will get more people excited. They're going to see their paperweight (or whatever) and know that they have played a part in Lunar Prospector '09 or whatever they call it.
That would probably not be a bad idea. It certainly would be a boon to the local diving industry if the drop it on the Atlantic Coast, since there is very little good diving in North Florida. They are already going to have to decontaminate it to sell it for scrap. The only disadvantage for NASA is that the wouldn't get the revenue from selling it for scrap or on E-bay.
The big technical problem would be getting the structure deep enough to sink it, and getting it there in one piece so it isn't a pile of scaffolding when they get it on the bottom.
The only reason I am still using a tower instead of a laptop at work is that I have yet to find one that can handle a dual-head video card. Granted, there are docking stations that will take a PCI card, and one of them could probably be made to work. I actually hadn't thought of that until now. (must try this. ..) I've gotten so used to Xinerama that I can't do my work with only one monitor.
One of the best things about the Georgia Tech CS program is that they don't attempt to teach you any specific languages. None. Nada. They teach concepts. In fact, when I was there the first programming class was all in pseudocode. The real advantage to this is that when you get out in the real world, the hot language you learned three years ago in school is now obsolete, and you're going to have to learn a whole new API, or learn parts of the API you've never used before, or learn the API that the Cheezy-poof crazed program you're replacing came up with in a fit of carbohydate-induced stupor. If you teach the concepts behind the language first, it's much easier. I've been given projects in languages I didn't know and completed them on time because I knew enough of the underlying concepts to map what I knew from previous languages to the new language.
Teach the basics. The applications will be easy to grasp once the rudiments are taught.
This is a truly bloody stupid design. Frag-A-Muffin has a good point. People are used to the 3 x 4 arrangement of phone keys, and anything that strays from that is only inviting confusion. One of these days I actually need to read the book Don't Make Me Think, but the title alone needs to be the mantra of all developers. Don't change the interface without a damn good reason. Making a device look cool is most emphatically NOT a good reason.
Someone, whose name I forgot once said "Only the nipple is an intuitive interface. All other interfaces are learned." This is so very true. Don't make a user learn a new interface just so you can show off your design skills
Although rubber-hosing the staff is a great way to relieve the stress caused by a long day of patching the latest critical vulnerability that just brought your system to it's knees:)
No lusers were killed in the production of this/. post.
I managed to slog all the way to the end of Island of the Day Before but it just was not that good of a book. All I can really remember about it was I want a poster of the print they used to make the cover, and being glad when I finished it so I could go back to reading Discworld or whatever it was I had in the queue at the time. It's just not up to the same narrative standard that his other books are at.
Yeah, When I was in Spain a couple of years ago my roommate managed to crash every ATM he went to. You could tell where we had been by the string of BSOD'ed ATMs waiting to be rebooted.
True dat. Just imagine how much more Gigli could have sucked if they had used CGI!.
I guess I should have been more specific CGI as a substitute for storytelling is the problem, not CGI itself. All of Pixar's films have been truly brilliant, and well worth multiple trips to the cineplex. I have yet to forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar, and he will be doing penance for a long time before he can expiate that sin.
Maybe I'm just getting more discerning in my old age, but there has been a noticeable decline in film quality. Most of the huge summer blockbusters that I have seen in the last several years can be described as "What the !@#$ was the director smoking?!?!?!?!?!?"
Personally, I blame it all on CGI. What is has made films too easy to produce. Star Wars: A New Hope was brilliant, because Lucas had to tell a story. He couldn't rely on computer-generated anthropomorphic creatures to move the story along, or more importantly, to move overpriced tie-in merchandise of the shelves. Once the barrier for entry was removed, and just about anyone who could get financing could afford spectacular effects, that became the standard and the whole idea of telling a story was lost.
Films are nothing more than glorified story telling. Once they become a showcase for someone's l33t programming skillz, they are irrelevant
Were it not that I have been in the cyber community long enough to realise that Microsoft has the same fear of all things *nix that Superman has of Kryptonite and the Undead have of Holy Water, I would be truly amazed that they haven't taken a hint from Apple and build the damn thing off a BSD core. Think about it, They've taken DOS, and over the years Microsoft has successively added more and more of the core functionality of *nix (networking, a gui, the concept of permissions) into it.
Although I run the risk of being branded a heretic for saying this, I actually like some of the features of XP. I don't like to run it, and I only own a copy since I got one free at an on-campus giveway, but it has redeeming features. Although I trust M$ about as much as I would trust your average despotic leader, they do know how to make an attractive, and somewhat useful, GUI.
What they don't do all that well is build a server OS. The GUI is pretty, and until I learned Novell and *nix, it made it easy to get stuff done. However, it's maddeningly stupid that Windows is constantly refreshing the GUI on a box that is a server, and 99% of the time has the monitor turned off.
That one factor is one of the biggest advantages of running *nix over Windows. I run a webserver that gets a decent amount of traffic on an ancient AMD K6-200. Aside from xhosting being a little slow, it runs great. I know a guy running a similar traffic site on Win 2K, and it's painful. To stay (get, become?) competitive Windows will need to separate the OS from the GUI, at least on the server end. The obvious way to do this would be to build of BSD, but it makes far too much sense to ever happen.
The sooner that Microsoft stops treating Linux like the enemy and starts treating it like another market (forgetting for the second that "Embrace and Extend" translates roughly to "Rape and Pilliage") the happier everyone will be:
*nix will never take over the desktop completely
*nix will continute to infiltrate the server market, and giving away Windows as Open Source wouldn't change that all that much
If Microsoft built off a BSD base, they wouldn't have to issue more patches than a boy scout troop leader
If Microsoft would learn to play nice, and start actually selling software for Linux, people would buy it.(not me, necessarily, but I could probably convert half my office to Linux + Microsoft Office for Linux if it existed)
I do web programming for a living, and we get into some very interesting conversations when we're designing a site. Occasionally, I get some very wierd requests for new and novel interfaces. This is a bad idea.
Although the web is fairly new. almost everybody is expecting to see a few things.
A navigation bar on the left
A breadcrumb, like on Yahoo!
Navigation at the very top
You do anything different, and you risk confusing the hell out of your users.You can argue all you want about why your interface is better,but unless you can hard data from usability testing, don't break tradition without a very good reason.
I may be heavily biased, since that is what I do all day, but make absolutely sure your code is valid HTML, and leave out all the kruft. Pretty much all WYSIWYG design interfaces by default don't put out valid html, so don't use them. [Emacs |VI] will perform admirably, produce clean code, and if you use a server side scripting language and hide most of your code in templates, will be as fast or faster than Dreamweaver or Frontpage. (You are using PHP/Coldfusion/CGI/ASP, Right?)
For the Love of (insert your choice of deity here), don't make a site all flash unless you have an extremely good reason to. As of yet, I have never heard of a good reason to do so, but they might, in theory, exist. Anything that you put into a web page, be it Javascript, Flash, Shockwave, audio, video, and massive, massive graphics, slows down the site, makes it harder to load, and will turn people away. I'm not saying to use NO graphics. I use quite a few at work, but keep them small, and realise that users very well may have images, stylesheets, or browser-supplied fonts turned off.
Finally, remember what HTML is designed to do. HTML is a markup language designed to format text. All the nifty graphics and such are good, and they have their place, but they weren't invisioned when HTML was designed, and in a sense, they are foriegn to the medium. Use them with caution.
Whoever mentioned the book Don't Make Me Think has a very good point. That one sentence tells you more about User Interfaces than many books ever will.
If you have Sendmail set up to filter mail through procmail, this will store all files with a VBS attachment in a file of your choosing. I should probably make it send an email to the offending party and the intended recipient, but I haven't gotten around to it. Cheers
# Take all messages that have a vbs attachment and store them
:0 B
* ^Content-Disposition: attachment;|inline;
* filename=".*\.vbs"
/var/virii/virii #whatever directory is convenient
Ok, this tears it. It's time to take action. Everybody on here write your congressman TODAY. Even better, go to www.whitehouse.gov and email the President today and tell him , politely, how this will make things MUCH, MUCH WORSE. I'm a sysadmin, and I would be comletely lost without BugTraq. Make sure the government knows how much it would hurt us.
If this is a hoax, this is approaching the status of a geek urban legend. There have been enough of these rumors to make Micro$oft want to think about giving in. If this is not a hoax, and it appears not to be, this is a good thing both for GNU/Linux users and for Microsoft.
First, it is a tacit admission by Micro$oft that Windows cannot dominate the market completely, and that they have pretty much given up hope of Penguin squashing completely. Although the article calls this a migration path TO Windows (or something like that) this is more likely going to be a migration path AWAY from Windows. I could get several of the more tech-savvy people at my office to give up Windows completely with this.
Micro$oft also probably realizes that this might be just the thing to help them in their appeals. If they can say "Look, we had to capitulate and port to Linux! We're not a monopoly!" it might help them.
MS Office for Linux. . . . Hmmm. I'd buy it. Possibly.
I used to work on the Technique (Georgia Tech student newspaper), and did most of the documentation for my senior - year class projects. I did most of this work using StarOffice 5.0, with very few problems interacting with either the Winblows or Mac version of Word. Except for a very few idiosyncracies, StarOffice works quite well. There are a few things it won't do:
Em - dash, or the nicer - looking hyphen used in compound words.
"Smart Quotes" where one turns one way and one the other
For some reason, Word always tries to read a StarOffice - editied document as Word6.0
Other than that, I have had no problems. You will get some small (an extra space or two) changes in format, but it isn't unreadable.
My only complaint with StarOffice is that the spreadheet is marginally harder to use. The formula tool isn't is intuitive as Excel's but that may be more of a product of what I am accustomed to rather than actual user interface defficiencies.
I am a system admin for a lab in an educational institution, and I can say that I'm pretty certain I would be nailed to a tree if I tried this. First, it is probably illegal. Fun, but still illegal. Second, since I am on a subnet, everyone else in my institution would be bogged down because of the increased traffic. Lastly, the previous poster is certainly right that in almost all cases a cracker won't be as daft as to use one IP address to launch a DOS attack. But it's fun to contemplate. . . .
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This really shouldn't have an effect on religion, at least not Christianity. Certain interpretations of Genesis aside, the Bible is largely silent on the mechanics of creation of the universe, and is concerned only with our particular part of it. Most of the confusion between fundamentalists and scientists result from trying to read a very ancient Hebrew text through the eyes of post-enlightenment readers, and not getting the symbolic importance of what is being written.
Now this makes me feel warm and fuzzy on a dreary Tuesday Morning. Although Bill Gates' popluarity would have been best served to go on Star Trek:TNG as a borg, the next best thing he can do to is to actually be polite to the open source crowd for a change. True, most of us want to crush the Microsoft juggernaut under the heels of the Penguin, interoperability between Microsoft and *nix is for the most part a very good thing. I've been happily using Linux as my main platform since 1998, but not everybody is in love with the command line.
Of course, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so I am sure they will find some way to screw this up.
Good point. I would be far more likely to give $100 to fund the Beagle 3 mission to Mars than to pay for this. It's not that the launch tower isn't a monument to human history, but that amount of money could do so much more.
The big problem that the vast majority of the public are not excited by space travel. You aren't going to get people excited by maintaining a scaffold. I like the e-bay idea. Auction off small pieces encased in Lucite, and use the money to fund a rover on the Moon. THAT will get more people excited. They're going to see their paperweight (or whatever) and know that they have played a part in Lunar Prospector '09 or whatever they call it.
That would probably not be a bad idea. It certainly would be a boon to the local diving industry if the drop it on the Atlantic Coast, since there is very little good diving in North Florida. They are already going to have to decontaminate it to sell it for scrap. The only disadvantage for NASA is that the wouldn't get the revenue from selling it for scrap or on E-bay.
The big technical problem would be getting the structure deep enough to sink it, and getting it there in one piece so it isn't a pile of scaffolding when they get it on the bottom.
--Josh
The only reason I am still using a tower instead of a laptop at work is that I have yet to find one that can handle a dual-head video card. Granted, there are docking stations that will take a PCI card, and one of them could probably be made to work. I actually hadn't thought of that until now. (must try this. . .) I've gotten so used to Xinerama that I can't do my work with only one monitor.
One of the best things about the Georgia Tech CS program is that they don't attempt to teach you any specific languages. None. Nada. They teach concepts. In fact, when I was there the first programming class was all in pseudocode. The real advantage to this is that when you get out in the real world, the hot language you learned three years ago in school is now obsolete, and you're going to have to learn a whole new API, or learn parts of the API you've never used before, or learn the API that the Cheezy-poof crazed program you're replacing came up with in a fit of carbohydate-induced stupor. If you teach the concepts behind the language first, it's much easier. I've been given projects in languages I didn't know and completed them on time because I knew enough of the underlying concepts to map what I knew from previous languages to the new language.
Teach the basics. The applications will be easy to grasp once the rudiments are taught.
This is a truly bloody stupid design. Frag-A-Muffin has a good point. People are used to the 3 x 4 arrangement of phone keys, and anything that strays from that is only inviting confusion. One of these days I actually need to read the book Don't Make Me Think, but the title alone needs to be the mantra of all developers. Don't change the interface without a damn good reason. Making a device look cool is most emphatically NOT a good reason.
Someone, whose name I forgot once said "Only the nipple is an intuitive interface. All other interfaces are learned." This is so very true. Don't make a user learn a new interface just so you can show off your design skills
Although rubber-hosing the staff is a great way to relieve the stress caused by a long day of patching the latest critical vulnerability that just brought your system to it's knees :)
/. post.
No lusers were killed in the production of this
I managed to slog all the way to the end of Island of the Day Before but it just was not that good of a book. All I can really remember about it was I want a poster of the print they used to make the cover, and being glad when I finished it so I could go back to reading Discworld or whatever it was I had in the queue at the time. It's just not up to the same narrative standard that his other books are at.
Yeah, When I was in Spain a couple of years ago my roommate managed to crash every ATM he went to. You could tell where we had been by the string of BSOD'ed ATMs waiting to be rebooted.
True dat. Just imagine how much more Gigli could have sucked if they had used CGI!.
I guess I should have been more specific CGI as a substitute for storytelling is the problem, not CGI itself. All of Pixar's films have been truly brilliant, and well worth multiple trips to the cineplex. I have yet to forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar, and he will be doing penance for a long time before he can expiate that sin.
Maybe I'm just getting more discerning in my old age, but there has been a noticeable decline in film quality. Most of the huge summer blockbusters that I have seen in the last several years can be described as "What the !@#$ was the director smoking?!?!?!?!?!?"
Personally, I blame it all on CGI. What is has made films too easy to produce. Star Wars: A New Hope was brilliant, because Lucas had to tell a story. He couldn't rely on computer-generated anthropomorphic creatures to move the story along, or more importantly, to move overpriced tie-in merchandise of the shelves. Once the barrier for entry was removed, and just about anyone who could get financing could afford spectacular effects, that became the standard and the whole idea of telling a story was lost.
Films are nothing more than glorified story telling. Once they become a showcase for someone's l33t programming skillz, they are irrelevant
Were it not that I have been in the cyber community long enough to realise that Microsoft has the same fear of all things *nix that Superman has of Kryptonite and the Undead have of Holy Water, I would be truly amazed that they haven't taken a hint from Apple and build the damn thing off a BSD core. Think about it, They've taken DOS, and over the years Microsoft has successively added more and more of the core functionality of *nix (networking, a gui, the concept of permissions) into it.
Although I run the risk of being branded a heretic for saying this, I actually like some of the features of XP. I don't like to run it, and I only own a copy since I got one free at an on-campus giveway, but it has redeeming features. Although I trust M$ about as much as I would trust your average despotic leader, they do know how to make an attractive, and somewhat useful, GUI.
What they don't do all that well is build a server OS. The GUI is pretty, and until I learned Novell and *nix, it made it easy to get stuff done. However, it's maddeningly stupid that Windows is constantly refreshing the GUI on a box that is a server, and 99% of the time has the monitor turned off.
That one factor is one of the biggest advantages of running *nix over Windows. I run a webserver that gets a decent amount of traffic on an ancient AMD K6-200. Aside from xhosting being a little slow, it runs great. I know a guy running a similar traffic site on Win 2K, and it's painful. To stay (get, become?) competitive Windows will need to separate the OS from the GUI, at least on the server end. The obvious way to do this would be to build of BSD, but it makes far too much sense to ever happen.
The sooner that Microsoft stops treating Linux like the enemy and starts treating it like another market (forgetting for the second that "Embrace and Extend" translates roughly to "Rape and Pilliage") the happier everyone will be:
Go ahead and dope slap me. I meant to define that. The breadcrumb is the navigation near the top of the page like this
Home > Arts > Visual Arts > Photography >
that is supposed to aid you in a drilldown search.
Sorry.
I do web programming for a living, and we get into some very interesting conversations when we're designing a site. Occasionally, I get some very wierd requests for new and novel interfaces. This is a bad idea.
Although the web is fairly new. almost everybody is expecting to see a few things.
- A navigation bar on the left
- A breadcrumb, like on Yahoo!
- Navigation at the very top
You do anything different, and you risk confusing the hell out of your users.You can argue all you want about why your interface is better,but unless you can hard data from usability testing, don't break tradition without a very good reason.I may be heavily biased, since that is what I do all day, but make absolutely sure your code is valid HTML, and leave out all the kruft. Pretty much all WYSIWYG design interfaces by default don't put out valid html, so don't use them. [Emacs |VI] will perform admirably, produce clean code, and if you use a server side scripting language and hide most of your code in templates, will be as fast or faster than Dreamweaver or Frontpage. (You are using PHP/Coldfusion/CGI/ASP, Right?)
For the Love of (insert your choice of deity here), don't make a site all flash unless you have an extremely good reason to. As of yet, I have never heard of a good reason to do so, but they might, in theory, exist. Anything that you put into a web page, be it Javascript, Flash, Shockwave, audio, video, and massive, massive graphics, slows down the site, makes it harder to load, and will turn people away. I'm not saying to use NO graphics. I use quite a few at work, but keep them small, and realise that users very well may have images, stylesheets, or browser-supplied fonts turned off.
Finally, remember what HTML is designed to do. HTML is a markup language designed to format text. All the nifty graphics and such are good, and they have their place, but they weren't invisioned when HTML was designed, and in a sense, they are foriegn to the medium. Use them with caution.
Whoever mentioned the book Don't Make Me Think has a very good point. That one sentence tells you more about User Interfaces than many books ever will.
If you have Sendmail set up to filter mail through procmail, this will store all files with a VBS attachment in a file of your choosing. I should probably make it send an email to the offending party and the intended recipient, but I haven't gotten around to it. Cheers
# Take all messages that have a vbs attachment and store them
:0 B
* ^Content-Disposition: attachment;|inline;
* filename=".*\.vbs"
/var/virii/virii #whatever directory is convenient
Ok, this tears it. It's time to take action. Everybody on here write your congressman TODAY. Even better, go to www.whitehouse.gov and email the President today and tell him , politely, how this will make things MUCH, MUCH WORSE. I'm a sysadmin, and I would be comletely lost without BugTraq. Make sure the government knows how much it would hurt us.
If this is a hoax, this is approaching the status of a geek urban legend. There have been enough of these rumors to make Micro$oft want to think about giving in. If this is not a hoax, and it appears not to be, this is a good thing both for GNU/Linux users and for Microsoft.
First, it is a tacit admission by Micro$oft that Windows cannot dominate the market completely, and that they have pretty much given up hope of Penguin squashing completely. Although the article calls this a migration path TO Windows (or something like that) this is more likely going to be a migration path AWAY from Windows. I could get several of the more tech-savvy people at my office to give up Windows completely with this.
Micro$oft also probably realizes that this might be just the thing to help them in their appeals. If they can say "Look, we had to capitulate and port to Linux! We're not a monopoly!" it might help them.
MS Office for Linux. . . . Hmmm. I'd buy it. Possibly.
I used to work on the Technique (Georgia Tech student newspaper), and did most of the documentation for my senior - year class projects. I did most of this work using StarOffice 5.0, with very few problems interacting with either the Winblows or Mac version of Word. Except for a very few idiosyncracies, StarOffice works quite well. There are a few things it won't do:
Other than that, I have had no problems. You will get some small (an extra space or two) changes in format, but it isn't unreadable.
My only complaint with StarOffice is that the spreadheet is marginally harder to use. The formula tool isn't is intuitive as Excel's but that may be more of a product of what I am accustomed to rather than actual user interface defficiencies.
JoshI am a system admin for a lab in an educational institution, and I can say that I'm pretty certain I would be nailed to a tree if I tried this. First, it is probably illegal. Fun, but still illegal. Second, since I am on a subnet, everyone else in my institution would be bogged down because of the increased traffic. Lastly, the previous poster is certainly right that in almost all cases a cracker won't be as daft as to use one IP address to launch a DOS attack. But it's fun to contemplate. . . .