Try running alsamixergui and see if that comes up. If it does, make sure that at least the Master and PCM volume is non-zero (I normally have them set at about 75% or so). Quit it and you should be done.
If you fancy this sort of thing, there is a Linux equivalent in the form of Skippy-XD. If you can't compile up the XD version (which uses XDamage so that you get real time updates to the window thumbnails) then you can try the slower but still useful Skippy version.
Having recently been shopping for a laser printer, I can attest that they aren't expensive any more. You can buy a laser printer for about Can$150 and up. That makes them barely more expensive than an inkjet. You get reamed when you replace the cartridge but still it works out cheaper per page than buying new inks for a inkjet.
I have a laptop running Windows XP SP2 which still blue screens, eats its file system and generally becomes slow as molasses after 9-12 months requiring a fresh image from the ghost partition. This is a box with a firewall, up-to-date anti-virus, spyware scanner, Firefox, MS Office 97 and not a lot else. The only extra devices it sees is an Epson scanner, a Lexmark laser printer and a USB mouse. I'm still not impressed with MS's latest offering. Maybe I don't know "how to use" MS's offering but it is a major pain to keep that one box alive. I could understand it if it was constantly being used to download flash games or other "shareware" software. Nothing else on the LAN suffers in this way but then again, nothing else on the LAN runs Windows.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:Does anyone else find myth busters annoying?
on
Archimedes Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
They run these unscientific experiments (most involving explosions or decaying corpses) and then "conclusively bust" myths. Some experiments are fun and interesting, but most don't deserve the hard conclusions they assign.
For a while I wondered why the Mythbusters didn't have a theorist around to predict the likelihood of success or optimise the designs. Then I realised that given good theoretical estimates in advance, they wouldn't even bother doing some of the experiments. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations normally tally with the results but not always.
For the most part, the conclusions they draw are reasonable based on the evidence they collect. It's all very well to sit back in the armchair and criticise but unless you are building something to correct their mistakes and demonstrate that they really missed something important, it's not really a useful exercise.
OpenOffice(TM) is a trademark of some other company, not Sun. Therefore OpenOffice.org is the name of the LGPL'd part of StarOffice. It's in the FAQ if anybody actually bothered to read it.
I remember fondly Sibelius on the Acorn Archimedes. This was not only a great platform to write music on, it had some ability to actually interpret the music and "perform" it, phrasing the music as a human performer might with emphasis on the lead-in to phrases, accelerating subtly through runs of notes and so forth. If I remember rightly, it was even used to perform (at a concert) a piece by Ligeti which was deemed too hard for a human player to play.
Now if anyone knows of any open-source software which can musically perform, I'd be interested. Most computer playback has all the nuance of a calculator.
'm going to stop hitting those pr0n, warez and gambiling sites on my work computer. I'm going to stop opening those emails saying I have to apply the latest hotfixes. I'm going to disable javascript, images, and popups.
I'm sure you were being sarcastic... you were being sarcastic, right? Yes? Phew.
If you want to browse the wilder reaches of the web, you really owe it to yourself to ensure that you have Javascript disabled. You really don't want to visit any site that requires that Javascript be enabled if you don't believe it to be safe. The "NoScript" extension allows you to maintain a whitelist of sites that are allowed to use JavaScript and everything else can go hang.
And if you don't require IDN support, you might as well disable it. Go to "about:config", seach for enableIDN and disable it there. IDN seems to be a mix of problems - some implementation issues and some design issues. For anything like that, if I don't need it, it's disabled.
And if you haven't already got a pop-up blocker... well....
I'm not going to comment on the opening emails bit. Nobody^WFew People^W^WIdiots^WI give up.
The test was composed of white text on a white background. Colored shapes of various sizes swirled in the background behind the text in a pseudo-random pattern
That is fairly easy to break if the text is stationary - simply keep taking pictures. Once you have enough (probably 10 seconds worth at 3fps) just stack all the images on top of each other and "add" them up. The moving parts will fade into the background and leave the text standing proud for some quick OCR.
Now if the text moved as well, it would be better. But you still have create problems for platforms without Flash and for any blind users. Flash for captcha doesn't sound that bright to me.
There are three projects related to Ultima Underworld remakes. Most of them seem to have hit the "running out of steam" phase of development but the code is all there waiting for some new blood.
So before embracing the Quake 3 engine to do yet another remake, you might consider helping one of these projects out. Underworld Adventures has the most recent change date in their news page.
"We got dis RIAA contract we'd like you to sign... umm, sign right here. Yeah, it's a real luxury havin' a drummer with two good arms, you know... real luxury..."
ObDefLeppard: Now we know the truth!
Hardware Translucency in Linux
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When will X.org and desktop environments bring this capability to linux?
Well X.org bought you real (as opposed to simulated) translucent windows and soft drop shadows as of 6.8. Getting it to run at a decent speed requires a decent graphics card and preferably an NVidia one as their drivers provide Render and Composite acceleration.
Not that I think that translucency in all windows is a good move - it's just visual clutter. Like fading in and fading out menus, it looks cool but it gets in the way. I disabled that feature in Windows 2000, it is disabled on my Windows XP laptop. Drop shadows on the other hand actually improve the visual cues allowing you to pick important windows and menus out of the mix on the screen and are worth the processor cost and so I have drop shadows on my Ubuntu AMD64 box where I have the GPU required to make it fast. On my other linux boxes (Mandriva desktop and FC3 laptop) I don't bother.
in the worst case, quicksort has Q*O(n^2) behaviour
Quicksort exhibits n-squared behaviour when the data set is sorted but reversed. Most decent quicksort routines do a random shuffle of the data at the start to avoid this issue.
Choosing a sort for a particular situation is very much a matter of choosing. A shell sort is very fast for small data sets - it's quick to implement and follows C*O(n^1.27), where C is small compared to P or Q in your example. With mostly sorted data sets, the choice to sort algorithm is even more tuning sensitive - consider depth-sorting vertices in a rotating model - most of the data isn't moving around very fast and is exchanging a few places up and down the list. Sometimes the more trivial and naive sort works better than quicksort even for large mostly-sorted sets.
The two mice scuttled impatiently around in their glass transports. Finally they composed themselves, and Benji moved forward to address Arthur.
"Now, Earth creature," he said, "the situation we have in effect is this. We have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for the last ten million years in order to find this wretched thing called the Ultimate Question."
"Why?" said Arthur, sharply.
"No - we already thought of that one," said Frankie interrupting, "but it doesn't fit the answer. Why? - Forty-Two... you see, it doesn't work.
Ooops. Sorry. Should have RTFA. Wrong Top Mice. I'll go away now.
Have you tried it? The tooth I tried it on was horribly pucked after 16 hours in some cheap supermarket cola. Hardly fully dissolved but certainly seriously damaged.
If you want to persuade people not to drink coke (or any fizzy pop - the coke/pepsi results tend to be more impressive...) just before bed, take a tooth (doesn't have to be human), drop it into a jar of coke in the night in front of them and then sieve it out of the jar in the morning. At best it will be horribly corroded, at worst it may be a small few pieces left. Gotta love that phoshoric acid touch...
Some people refuse to admit that GUIs provide convenience. They won't admit that many tasks are easier with a GUI, not to mention much more straightforward.
But remote administration with a GUI only requires a GUI on the client box - the server can be completely headless, GUI-less and cruft-free and the admin (on the client) can use whatever happens to be appropriate to manage that machine.
I don't know enough about Jon's latest project or iTunes to know what the non-infringing or infringing uses are. He's definitely not getting charged under the DMCA.
Unless Fair Use has withered to next to nothing, stripping the DRM off your own iTunes files is not in breach of copyright. It might be in breach of any license you received from Apple but that is a license issue between the vendor and you and might lead to license termination.
So I think that makes it at most a Civil matter, not a criminal one. IANAL, IDLIN[1]
After a while working on very large projects (>1Gb source code) I've begun to find that certain things which looked fine for personal projects are serious problems when you scale up.
Most critical is managing complexity. Large, complex functions are bad - they have more bugs, they are harder to maintain, harder to bug fix (a change has more likelyhood of breaking something else). If a function has grown beyond a hundred lines of (real) code, it is almost certainly too large. If it has more than 4 levels of nesting, it is too large.
Comments also matter. It's easy to code a couple of thousand lines of fresh code over a weekend if you get in the groove. It is almost impossible to unpick it one year later if you didn't comment it as you go.
Variable and function names should be expressive. No single letter variable names! No obscure combinations of letters like words with no vowels (fnct could be function or function control, or even Function Numerical Constant Type). And personally I find that reverse Hungarian notation can be more trouble than it's worth. puiAnnoying!
Build in automatic checks on everything. If a pointer to a function should never be null, check it and stop if it is. If a variable should only have values 1 -> maxIterations, then check it. If you (or anyone else) ever breaks that assumption, the code will flag it for you.
Beyond that, nothing beats good design, especially designs where extending the original work is easy. So many designs end up as tangle knots of conflicts because they ended up trying to solve problems that the original code base never envisaged.
I'll add Oryx and Crake by Margret Atwood. Terrific book, much film potential.
I agree with you there about the book. I think that would be a pretty tough book to film though - the main character would have to vocalise much of his thoughts to give some indication of what is going on and I fear that if Hollywood got their hands on it, it might have a happy ending (Oryx lives! AArrrrrgghhh!) much as happened to the original cinematic releases of Brazil and Bladerunner, both of which had happy/er ending sequences bolted on.
Unless you think that "hour" rhymes with "whore," there is no logical reason for having a "u" in the word "color."
Except colour is pronounced kol-ur rather than kol-or, at least where I grew up. And you seem to be implying that english is vaguely consistent - try the following on for size (it's a standard speech synthesiser nasty):
Red Hat currently, 0 out of 133 Secunia advisories
Based on flaws in 64 different packages out of a total of 477 packages.
11 red hat update for kernel 6 red hat update for ethereal 5 red hat update for httpd 4 red hat update for samba 4 red hat update for mozilla 4 red hat update for cvs 4 red hat update for cups etc.
Lets compare that against the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition. All of these defects are against the core Windows operating system. You have to go to the other Microsoft products to find out the numbers for those.
Lets pick another Microsoft release - say Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Oh dear - currently, 16 out of 79 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Or say Microsoft Office XP. Currently, 2 out of 14 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Another - lets try Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 - surely there must be a fully patched MS product out there! Currently, 18 out of 77 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Pick something enterprise critical - say SQL Server 2000. Currently, 1 out of 10 Secunia advisories is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Passwords can work fine and be easy for the users, it is the systems that make passwords weak. The ability to use a dictionary attack on passwords is insane. Any reasonable implimentation of password security would let a user try a very limited number of attempts to gain access by a password (to allow for typing errors and human error, even accidentally using the wrong password).
It depends on how easy it is to get hold of that password file. If I walk over to someone's Windows machines, reboot it and lift the SAM file, I now have the opportunity to brute force that password file at my leisure without the owner being any the wiser. Once I have obtained the passwords with l0phtcrack or whatever, I have free access to that system.
Now physical access to a machine is an easy way to get the needed information. For most secure systems, that not possible so then it is extremely important that the passwords are kept in a user-unreachable location. Hence the reason that the shadow password file on Unix is only readable by root. The golden rule is that if obfuscated information can be read, it can be eventually compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Having recently been shopping for a laser printer, I can attest that they aren't expensive any more. You can buy a laser printer for about Can$150 and up. That makes them barely more expensive than an inkjet. You get reamed when you replace the cartridge but still it works out cheaper per page than buying new inks for a inkjet.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
For a while I wondered why the Mythbusters didn't have a theorist around to predict the likelihood of success or optimise the designs. Then I realised that given good theoretical estimates in advance, they wouldn't even bother doing some of the experiments. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations normally tally with the results but not always.
For the most part, the conclusions they draw are reasonable based on the evidence they collect. It's all very well to sit back in the armchair and criticise but unless you are building something to correct their mistakes and demonstrate that they really missed something important, it's not really a useful exercise.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
OpenOffice(TM) is a trademark of some other company, not Sun. Therefore OpenOffice.org is the name of the LGPL'd part of StarOffice. It's in the FAQ if anybody actually bothered to read it.
OpenOffice.org name FAQ
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now if anyone knows of any open-source software which can musically perform, I'd be interested. Most computer playback has all the nuance of a calculator.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm sure you were being sarcastic ... you were being sarcastic, right? Yes? Phew.
If you want to browse the wilder reaches of the web, you really owe it to yourself to ensure that you have Javascript disabled. You really don't want to visit any site that requires that Javascript be enabled if you don't believe it to be safe. The "NoScript" extension allows you to maintain a whitelist of sites that are allowed to use JavaScript and everything else can go hang.
And if you don't require IDN support, you might as well disable it. Go to "about:config", seach for enableIDN and disable it there. IDN seems to be a mix of problems - some implementation issues and some design issues. For anything like that, if I don't need it, it's disabled.
And if you haven't already got a pop-up blocker ... well ....
I'm not going to comment on the opening emails bit. Nobody^WFew People^W^WIdiots^WI give up.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
That is fairly easy to break if the text is stationary - simply keep taking pictures. Once you have enough (probably 10 seconds worth at 3fps) just stack all the images on top of each other and "add" them up. The moving parts will fade into the background and leave the text standing proud for some quick OCR.
Now if the text moved as well, it would be better. But you still have create problems for platforms without Flash and for any blind users. Flash for captcha doesn't sound that bright to me.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There are three projects related to Ultima Underworld remakes. Most of them seem to have hit the "running out of steam" phase of development but the code is all there waiting for some new blood.
So before embracing the Quake 3 engine to do yet another remake, you might consider helping one of these projects out. Underworld Adventures has the most recent change date in their news page.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
ObDefLeppard: Now we know the truth!
Well X.org bought you real (as opposed to simulated) translucent windows and soft drop shadows as of 6.8. Getting it to run at a decent speed requires a decent graphics card and preferably an NVidia one as their drivers provide Render and Composite acceleration.
Not that I think that translucency in all windows is a good move - it's just visual clutter. Like fading in and fading out menus, it looks cool but it gets in the way. I disabled that feature in Windows 2000, it is disabled on my Windows XP laptop. Drop shadows on the other hand actually improve the visual cues allowing you to pick important windows and menus out of the mix on the screen and are worth the processor cost and so I have drop shadows on my Ubuntu AMD64 box where I have the GPU required to make it fast. On my other linux boxes (Mandriva desktop and FC3 laptop) I don't bother.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Quicksort exhibits n-squared behaviour when the data set is sorted but reversed. Most decent quicksort routines do a random shuffle of the data at the start to avoid this issue.
Choosing a sort for a particular situation is very much a matter of choosing. A shell sort is very fast for small data sets - it's quick to implement and follows C*O(n^1.27), where C is small compared to P or Q in your example. With mostly sorted data sets, the choice to sort algorithm is even more tuning sensitive - consider depth-sorting vertices in a rotating model - most of the data isn't moving around very fast and is exchanging a few places up and down the list. Sometimes the more trivial and naive sort works better than quicksort even for large mostly-sorted sets.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Then you should be playing Savage, which has precisely this set-up. Windows & Linux versions.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
"Now, Earth creature," he said, "the situation we have in effect is this. We have, as you know, been more or less running your planet for the last ten million years in order to find this wretched thing called the Ultimate Question."
"Why?" said Arthur, sharply.
"No - we already thought of that one," said Frankie interrupting, "but it doesn't fit the answer. Why? - Forty-Two ... you see, it doesn't work.
Ooops. Sorry. Should have RTFA. Wrong Top Mice. I'll go away now.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Have you tried it? The tooth I tried it on was horribly pucked after 16 hours in some cheap supermarket cola. Hardly fully dissolved but certainly seriously damaged.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you want to persuade people not to drink coke (or any fizzy pop - the coke/pepsi results tend to be more impressive ...) just before bed, take a tooth (doesn't have to be human), drop it into a jar of coke in the night in front of them and then sieve it out of the jar in the morning. At best it will be horribly corroded, at worst it may be a small few pieces left. Gotta love that phoshoric acid touch...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
But remote administration with a GUI only requires a GUI on the client box - the server can be completely headless, GUI-less and cruft-free and the admin (on the client) can use whatever happens to be appropriate to manage that machine.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Unless Fair Use has withered to next to nothing, stripping the DRM off your own iTunes files is not in breach of copyright. It might be in breach of any license you received from Apple but that is a license issue between the vendor and you and might lead to license termination.
So I think that makes it at most a Civil matter, not a criminal one. IANAL, IDLIN[1]
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1](I Don't Live In Norway).
Most critical is managing complexity. Large, complex functions are bad - they have more bugs, they are harder to maintain, harder to bug fix (a change has more likelyhood of breaking something else). If a function has grown beyond a hundred lines of (real) code, it is almost certainly too large. If it has more than 4 levels of nesting, it is too large.
Comments also matter. It's easy to code a couple of thousand lines of fresh code over a weekend if you get in the groove. It is almost impossible to unpick it one year later if you didn't comment it as you go.
Variable and function names should be expressive. No single letter variable names! No obscure combinations of letters like words with no vowels (fnct could be function or function control, or even Function Numerical Constant Type). And personally I find that reverse Hungarian notation can be more trouble than it's worth. puiAnnoying!
Build in automatic checks on everything. If a pointer to a function should never be null, check it and stop if it is. If a variable should only have values 1 -> maxIterations, then check it. If you (or anyone else) ever breaks that assumption, the code will flag it for you.
Beyond that, nothing beats good design, especially designs where extending the original work is easy. So many designs end up as tangle knots of conflicts because they ended up trying to solve problems that the original code base never envisaged.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I've never heard of this "404" record label. Or are they a group representing record labels?
It's one half of the group 808 :-)
I agree with you there about the book. I think that would be a pretty tough book to film though - the main character would have to vocalise much of his thoughts to give some indication of what is going on and I fear that if Hollywood got their hands on it, it might have a happy ending (Oryx lives! AArrrrrgghhh!) much as happened to the original cinematic releases of Brazil and Bladerunner, both of which had happy/er ending sequences bolted on.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Except colour is pronounced kol-ur rather than kol-or, at least where I grew up. And you seem to be implying that english is vaguely consistent - try the following on for size (it's a standard speech synthesiser nasty):
Lawn mowers are thoroughly tough though.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Red Hat currently, 0 out of 133 Secunia advisories
Based on flaws in 64 different packages out of a total of 477 packages.
Lets compare that against the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition. All of these defects are against the core Windows operating system. You have to go to the other Microsoft products to find out the numbers for those.
Lets pick another Microsoft release - say Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Oh dear - currently, 16 out of 79 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Or say Microsoft Office XP. Currently, 2 out of 14 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Another - lets try Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 - surely there must be a fully patched MS product out there! Currently, 18 out of 77 Secunia advisories are marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Pick something enterprise critical - say SQL Server 2000. Currently, 1 out of 10 Secunia advisories is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Doesn't really look good.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It depends on how easy it is to get hold of that password file. If I walk over to someone's Windows machines, reboot it and lift the SAM file, I now have the opportunity to brute force that password file at my leisure without the owner being any the wiser. Once I have obtained the passwords with l0phtcrack or whatever, I have free access to that system.
Now physical access to a machine is an easy way to get the needed information. For most secure systems, that not possible so then it is extremely important that the passwords are kept in a user-unreachable location. Hence the reason that the shadow password file on Unix is only readable by root. The golden rule is that if obfuscated information can be read, it can be eventually compromised.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes