You are a very lucky man. The email address I used to get my first domain was an address I got back in high school from a local government push to 'get that thar interweb into the city'. These people wouldn't know how to harvest email addresses if I told them.
But that address has recieved a steady dosage of spam since I registered the domain, as has root@, admin@, sales@, webmaster@, and a few other generic.com-type addresses. And I'm pretty sure (although I can't verify it) that 'awdang.com' has never been owned before.
Eventually I just gave up on the dream of not having spam. Now it's turned into my spam sandbox...
Here's what's keeping me in Windows for everyday work, and has relegated my Linux box to ssh-only:
Graphical User Interface.
You can talk all you want to about Gnome or KDE or Interface X - the fact of the matter is that the Windows interface is consistent. With the exception of some crappy freeware, if I open up an application, it will use the colors I've told it to use, the titlebar will look the same as all of the other windows, etc.
From my (admittedly limited) experience with X and KDE (and Gnome, although I haven't used the latest and greatest), windows would open up with an apparently random window style. Some applications would decide they wanted to draw their own borders, some would use KDE's style. It was annoying as hell.
Application support is becoming less and less of an issue as Wine comes toward completion, but to be honest, I'd rather use Windows with XWin32 to get a remote desktop on my Linux box, for those applications in Linux that I just have to have.
If someone out there created a windowing system for Linux from scratch, ditching X, and made it completely consistent across the board, I would probably be more interested in using it. They could write an X server (client?) for it so they could run X applications during the transition.
Without a One True Front End, Linux isn't going to get far into the houses of the Generic Public User. People crave consistency within their user interface. Microsoft understood this, and I think that's one of the main reasons they're on top of everything today. If Macs had had open architechure, they would have been unstoppable.
There's no WAY I'm letting a company named Microvision anywhere near my eyes. I saw what happened when I let Microsoft near my computer... the last thing I need is for me to see nothing but a BSOD all day.
Or Morse Code? You could do an entire user interface with a single button!
That's not funny. A company we contracted with once to do barcodes on namebadges provided us with a device that sat on a daisychain between the computer and the printer. It had a parallel cable to plug into the printer and another to plug into the computer.
It had two buttons: one black, one white, that - I swear to god - you had to use to navigate through a complicated set of menus, which it would print out on the printer. Configuring the thing for one use took roughly ten sheets of paper, if you printed on both sides. And if it got unplugged, well, you had to do it all over again.
The next time we wanted barcodes we had an OLE component developed in-house (the office was all Microsquash). As it stood, the one year we used it we had to develop a DOS-based application to get Access to talk to the thing correctly.
Actually, you can find them for less than that. PCKeyboard.com (actually a yahoo store) has 'em for $50.
Not that you would ever need to buy one if you already have one. Mine has been through more trauma than I care to recall. I got pissed once and threw it through a plate glass window into a lake, and it was working fine half an hour later.
Windows 9x hasn't used bitmapped widgets since day one. You can change the size of the font on the title bar and it will automatically change the size of the widgets on the titlebar.
The only thing that remains bitmapped about the Windows GUI is the icons, and I'm betting that 32x32 would make a droolingly good small icon on this display.
Actually, they're probably named 9T5Y67U4FP9763R2D2 and 44H2RT559C3P0. Not that they're any more likely to be one than the other, but the leftmost digits are likely to be similar across droids - which droids came from which production runs, etc. Then again, C3P0 was built singlehandedly by Anakin, so why would it even *have* a serial number?
But the code bloat is awful. Have you tried pressing 'run' with the default, blank project loaded? It churns out a 120K executable. Anything you add goes on top of that 120K. If you do anything with multiple forms, boxes, huge custom routines, added objects from other people, soon you're looking at 600K or more. The biggest executable it ever spit out at me was over a megabyte.
By contrast, using Visual C++ the right way (ie, no MFC) gives you a smallest executable of ~5K. The biggest I've ever gotten it is around 150K, and most of that was bitmap resources. Sure, it takes more time, sure, you have to know what you're doing, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Security has always been an afterthought in voting
on
The Perils Of E-Voting
·
· Score: 1
When you think about it, voting has really always been unsafe, not only from an informational integrity standpoint, but also from a physical security standpoint. Voters in Mexico recently dealt with nasty physical security issues, as did Syrians in their recent vote to elect Bashar Assad.
As for information security - hell, even our own slashdot showed just how flawed online voting can be. 36% of the votes in that poll were for one of the valid choices - the other 64% went off to la la land, but were still recorded.
Now, granted, real-life elections are orders of magnitude more secure than slashdot polls, but the problem of assumed identity exists in real life, not just in the online world. Dave Barry even touched on the subject in his recent novel Big Trouble, where an immigrant without so much as a greencard is picked up and paid to stuff votes in a Florida election.
The technology is there, and it would be exploited by people who are already exploiting it anyway. The benifits far outweigh the drawbacks - physical security issues disappear as voting doesn't take place in a central location, and even if the system isn't perfect, it will be no worse than what's in place now.
OLYMPUS Advanced Graphical Administration System Version 0.1 - Initial Developer's Release
This software is so far from being complete that they don't have much of anything except a few shots of mockups. They mention that it should not be used for production and that it's nowhere near complete.
This is all part of Linux's slide into the mainstream, and I'm not entirely sure that it's a step in the right direction. All the software does is put a Windows-style GUI on top of an encrypted channel - something anyone with an ssh client and UNIX competency has anyway.
In places, the 'GUI-on-top-of-CLI' is even more apparent, such as the "olympus ping" which simply opens a window with a text box and displays the result of a ping in a different format. That's very helpful, in case you forget how to spell 'ping'.
As a UNIX sysadmin, the notion that this could actually catch on frightens me. This could breed a whole new set of clueless [l]user/admins who don't know what traceroute is, or how to configure a firewall without their precious GUI. What's next, Linux Certification? Linux Certified Engineers?
The last thing the Linux world needs is abstraction of administrative functions via a GUI.
Of course computers will change drastically over the course of the next fifteen years. Look at how far computers have come in the past fifteen years - in 1985 we were dazzled by the Nintendo, using a mixture of IBM compatible machines and Atari / Commodore 64s. Eight bits. Wow.
But wet dreams about what the future holds aren't relevant to anything except sleeping. Of course computers will continue to evolve. They'll be faster and smaller and easier to use. They'll be pervasive. Literal shelves of books have been written on the subject - with such a dazzling array of opinions, one or two of them are bound to come through in some way. The truth is, there hasn't been a real 'revolution' in computers since 1947. All we've done with them since then is make them smaller, faster, and paint them in prettier colors.
Why should this guy know what he's talking about? Because he's from Yale? Please. I've got friends in small towns in the midwest who have a more solid grasp on this subject than this guy. The future of computers has less to do with their size, shape, and form than it has to do with humans and human interaction.
I'm not talking about human / computer interaction, although that, too, will contine to become more and more refined as computers become more powerful. I'm talking about the ability of computers to facilitate the interaction between human beings in a real-world environment.
The revolution in computers won't have anything to do with computers in the classical sense; it will have much more to do with the humans. We currently view computers as a 'platform' we can use to communicate or calculate. As the revolution begins, we will come to see computers in a new light: not as a platform for, but as a barrier to communication.
We need to come to terms with the fact that the fundamentals of our computing system is fatally flawed and is in dire need of replacement. Once we've done that, we can begin to truly redefine what we want computers for and restructure them to provide it for us.
Someone seriously needs to hack together a quick game of this if they haven't already and unleash it onto the anonymous cowards. I can see it now: fastest finger to get first post, endless spam in a virtual inbox, hot grits down everyone's pants, all without ever actually coming to slashdot. It would be so much fun that I'd never actually play it, I'd just think about it all day.
Unless they shoehorn this into the mainstream, I have doubts that it will catch on. The newly net-enabled techno-romantics have grown up seeing http://... - making the change to the (imho, unweildy) bxxp:// will not be easily done.
Sometimes I wish I was a better electrical engineer. For the longest time I've wanted to get a 6502 processor, reverse-engineer the Nintendo, and draft a PCI card that lets you upload ROMS and play them on non-emulated (and therefore theoretically perfect) hardware.
The video card would have to have a TV in, and there would have to be an audio patch so CD audio could still work, but it could be done.
And, of course, the ever-lovin' legal issue of having electronic copies of ROMS you don't own...
I spent $40 or whatever on O'Reilly's _Programming Perl_ and while I consider it money well spent, the most consistently referenced chapter (and the only one I can claim to actually need) is Chapter 2, which lists all of the functions that Perl has and uses, which is a direct conversion from the manpage, right down to the typos.
Uh, I want to play Myst all over again, except in 3D. I'm sure that *someone* else here agrees with me.
What concerns me the most is that the images they're showing don't mesh too well with my recollection of the original. Sure, it looks kind of like the original Myst, but you can see the polys. One of the things I liked the best about the original Myst was that it was beautiful. No creases in objects. Try as they might, I don't think they'll be able to get this version to anywhere near the quality that the original (still-image) version had.
I think their time would be better spent working on a real-time, first-person game in the Myst / Riven vein with a multithreaded plot. After all, if there's nothing to do a side-by-side comparison to, then there's practically nothing to complain about.
I have a Jornada 680 - the style with the keyboard. Does this 'glitch' affect those as well? The article doesn't seem to address the issue. Come to think of it, the article strikes me as really vague. It would be more comforting if they at least pointed to a press release on hp.com...
Slashdot Mirror
You are a very lucky man. The email address I used to get my first domain was an address I got back in high school from a local government push to 'get that thar interweb into the city'. These people wouldn't know how to harvest email addresses if I told them.
.com-type addresses. And I'm pretty sure (although I can't verify it) that 'awdang.com' has never been owned before.
But that address has recieved a steady dosage of spam since I registered the domain, as has root@, admin@, sales@, webmaster@, and a few other generic
Eventually I just gave up on the dream of not having spam. Now it's turned into my spam sandbox...
--sjd;
Ugh. I go off on Gnome and they port it to Windows. Yipe!
Here's what's keeping me in Windows for everyday work, and has relegated my Linux box to ssh-only:
Graphical User Interface.
You can talk all you want to about Gnome or KDE or Interface X - the fact of the matter is that the Windows interface is consistent. With the exception of some crappy freeware, if I open up an application, it will use the colors I've told it to use, the titlebar will look the same as all of the other windows, etc.
From my (admittedly limited) experience with X and KDE (and Gnome, although I haven't used the latest and greatest), windows would open up with an apparently random window style. Some applications would decide they wanted to draw their own borders, some would use KDE's style. It was annoying as hell.
Application support is becoming less and less of an issue as Wine comes toward completion, but to be honest, I'd rather use Windows with XWin32 to get a remote desktop on my Linux box, for those applications in Linux that I just have to have.
If someone out there created a windowing system for Linux from scratch, ditching X, and made it completely consistent across the board, I would probably be more interested in using it. They could write an X server (client?) for it so they could run X applications during the transition.
Without a One True Front End, Linux isn't going to get far into the houses of the Generic Public User. People crave consistency within their user interface. Microsoft understood this, and I think that's one of the main reasons they're on top of everything today. If Macs had had open architechure, they would have been unstoppable.
--sjd;
Eh, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
The entire concept of negative moderation sucks.
There's no WAY I'm letting a company named Microvision anywhere near my eyes. I saw what happened when I let Microsoft near my computer... the last thing I need is for me to see nothing but a BSOD all day.
--sjd;
It had two buttons: one black, one white, that - I swear to god - you had to use to navigate through a complicated set of menus, which it would print out on the printer. Configuring the thing for one use took roughly ten sheets of paper, if you printed on both sides. And if it got unplugged, well, you had to do it all over again.
The next time we wanted barcodes we had an OLE component developed in-house (the office was all Microsquash). As it stood, the one year we used it we had to develop a DOS-based application to get Access to talk to the thing correctly.
--sjd;
Actually, you can find them for less than that. PCKeyboard.com (actually a yahoo store) has 'em for $50.
Not that you would ever need to buy one if you already have one. Mine has been through more trauma than I care to recall. I got pissed once and threw it through a plate glass window into a lake, and it was working fine half an hour later.
Windows 9x hasn't used bitmapped widgets since day one. You can change the size of the font on the title bar and it will automatically change the size of the widgets on the titlebar.
The only thing that remains bitmapped about the Windows GUI is the icons, and I'm betting that 32x32 would make a droolingly good small icon on this display.
Must.. get.. a loan..
Actually, they're probably named 9T5Y67U4FP9763R2D2 and 44H2RT559C3P0. Not that they're any more likely to be one than the other, but the leftmost digits are likely to be similar across droids - which droids came from which production runs, etc. Then again, C3P0 was built singlehandedly by Anakin, so why would it even *have* a serial number?
... or in the case of Taco Bell: "No tinkering with the sauce" ...
... or in the case of Star Wars: "No tinkering with the force" ...
.sig
--
this is not my
Why do the archives posted on the page stop at 2/2000?
Because the mailing list has had no traffic since Februrary. Red Hat is dead. Isn't it obvious? They've released five upgrades in less than two years.
Furthermore, Debian and SuSE are dead, as is Linux, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Intel, TI, Motorola, Andover, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Steak and Shake.
This whole computer thing is just a fad, anyway.
Delphi is fast, I'll give it that.
But the code bloat is awful. Have you tried pressing 'run' with the default, blank project loaded? It churns out a 120K executable. Anything you add goes on top of that 120K. If you do anything with multiple forms, boxes, huge custom routines, added objects from other people, soon you're looking at 600K or more. The biggest executable it ever spit out at me was over a megabyte.
By contrast, using Visual C++ the right way (ie, no MFC) gives you a smallest executable of ~5K. The biggest I've ever gotten it is around 150K, and most of that was bitmap resources. Sure, it takes more time, sure, you have to know what you're doing, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
When you think about it, voting has really always been unsafe, not only from an informational integrity standpoint, but also from a physical security standpoint. Voters in Mexico recently dealt with nasty physical security issues, as did Syrians in their recent vote to elect Bashar Assad.
As for information security - hell, even our own slashdot showed just how flawed online voting can be. 36% of the votes in that poll were for one of the valid choices - the other 64% went off to la la land, but were still recorded.
Now, granted, real-life elections are orders of magnitude more secure than slashdot polls, but the problem of assumed identity exists in real life, not just in the online world. Dave Barry even touched on the subject in his recent novel Big Trouble, where an immigrant without so much as a greencard is picked up and paid to stuff votes in a Florida election.
The technology is there, and it would be exploited by people who are already exploiting it anyway. The benifits far outweigh the drawbacks - physical security issues disappear as voting doesn't take place in a central location, and even if the system isn't perfect, it will be no worse than what's in place now.
This software is so far from being complete that they don't have much of anything except a few shots of mockups. They mention that it should not be used for production and that it's nowhere near complete.
This is all part of Linux's slide into the mainstream, and I'm not entirely sure that it's a step in the right direction. All the software does is put a Windows-style GUI on top of an encrypted channel - something anyone with an ssh client and UNIX competency has anyway.
In places, the 'GUI-on-top-of-CLI' is even more apparent, such as the "olympus ping" which simply opens a window with a text box and displays the result of a ping in a different format. That's very helpful, in case you forget how to spell 'ping'.
As a UNIX sysadmin, the notion that this could actually catch on frightens me. This could breed a whole new set of clueless [l]user/admins who don't know what traceroute is, or how to configure a firewall without their precious GUI. What's next, Linux Certification? Linux Certified Engineers?
The last thing the Linux world needs is abstraction of administrative functions via a GUI.
Of course computers will change drastically over the course of the next fifteen years. Look at how far computers have come in the past fifteen years - in 1985 we were dazzled by the Nintendo, using a mixture of IBM compatible machines and Atari / Commodore 64s. Eight bits. Wow.
But wet dreams about what the future holds aren't relevant to anything except sleeping. Of course computers will continue to evolve. They'll be faster and smaller and easier to use. They'll be pervasive. Literal shelves of books have been written on the subject - with such a dazzling array of opinions, one or two of them are bound to come through in some way. The truth is, there hasn't been a real 'revolution' in computers since 1947. All we've done with them since then is make them smaller, faster, and paint them in prettier colors.
Why should this guy know what he's talking about? Because he's from Yale? Please. I've got friends in small towns in the midwest who have a more solid grasp on this subject than this guy. The future of computers has less to do with their size, shape, and form than it has to do with humans and human interaction.
I'm not talking about human / computer interaction, although that, too, will contine to become more and more refined as computers become more powerful. I'm talking about the ability of computers to facilitate the interaction between human beings in a real-world environment.
The revolution in computers won't have anything to do with computers in the classical sense; it will have much more to do with the humans. We currently view computers as a 'platform' we can use to communicate or calculate. As the revolution begins, we will come to see computers in a new light: not as a platform for, but as a barrier to communication.
We need to come to terms with the fact that the fundamentals of our computing system is fatally flawed and is in dire need of replacement. Once we've done that, we can begin to truly redefine what we want computers for and restructure them to provide it for us.
Then the revolution will begin.
Nintendo made the Power Glove years ago.
...are you *sure* you want one?
Wow! The study is right - my eyes jump straight to the text on that page!
Someone seriously needs to hack together a quick game of this if they haven't already and unleash it onto the anonymous cowards. I can see it now: fastest finger to get first post, endless spam in a virtual inbox, hot grits down everyone's pants, all without ever actually coming to slashdot. It would be so much fun that I'd never actually play it, I'd just think about it all day.
Unless they shoehorn this into the mainstream, I have doubts that it will catch on. The newly net-enabled techno-romantics have grown up seeing http://... - making the change to the (imho, unweildy) bxxp:// will not be easily done.
Coming soon to an internet near you:
bxxp://stallman.fsf/index.xml
...brave new world, I guess.
Sometimes I wish I was a better electrical engineer. For the longest time I've wanted to get a 6502 processor, reverse-engineer the Nintendo, and draft a PCI card that lets you upload ROMS and play them on non-emulated (and therefore theoretically perfect) hardware.
The video card would have to have a TV in, and there would have to be an audio patch so CD audio could still work, but it could be done.
And, of course, the ever-lovin' legal issue of having electronic copies of ROMS you don't own...
...the GPL (i.e. it's incompatibility with other licences, due to it's viral nature)...
.. [voice breaks] .. I've got the GPL virus.
Stephen: Catherine, hon, please sit down.
Catherine: Oh my god. What's wrong?! What is it?
Stephen: I've
Catherine: (realizing the implications) Oh my god... our children... what will happen to our children?
Stephen: I'm afraid that their DNA is now in the public domain. Anyone may clone them free of charge.
Catherine: Oh my god no...
Stephen: That's not all. Our neighbor Mr. Frumplestwiltchken has made a hundred copies of Lucy and is distributing her via Mail Order Brides.
(That's it, no more soda for me. Someone get me some caffiene-enhanced milk.)
Jesus. Richard Stallman can't do "man perl"?
I spent $40 or whatever on O'Reilly's _Programming Perl_ and while I consider it money well spent, the most consistently referenced chapter (and the only one I can claim to actually need) is Chapter 2, which lists all of the functions that Perl has and uses, which is a direct conversion from the manpage, right down to the typos.
Uh, I want to play Myst all over again, except in 3D. I'm sure that *someone* else here agrees with me.
What concerns me the most is that the images they're showing don't mesh too well with my recollection of the original. Sure, it looks kind of like the original Myst, but you can see the polys. One of the things I liked the best about the original Myst was that it was beautiful. No creases in objects. Try as they might, I don't think they'll be able to get this version to anywhere near the quality that the original (still-image) version had.
I think their time would be better spent working on a real-time, first-person game in the Myst / Riven vein with a multithreaded plot. After all, if there's nothing to do a side-by-side comparison to, then there's practically nothing to complain about.
Off-topic, but I read the above as "...take yourself to court and get yourself restrained."
I was thinking you were talking about suing yourself for having a criminal record. I had to read it four times before it finally sunk in.
Yes, I am dense.
I have a Jornada 680 - the style with the keyboard. Does this 'glitch' affect those as well? The article doesn't seem to address the issue. Come to think of it, the article strikes me as really vague. It would be more comforting if they at least pointed to a press release on hp.com...