I am a Perl programmer, I truly love the language.. all it's little strangenesses and all. As a 'First Language' I'd really not recommend it though, a first language should allow people to learn the basics and also allow it to be easy to apply them to whatever language they ended up using. Java and C++ are similar, this is a useful thing since both are heavily used and someone who truly knows one should be able to pick the other up with minimal trouble.
Personally I can see the advantage in doing what my Uni did, teaching the student a wide range of languages.. we had OO training in Eiffel and Ada, first principles in Ada, algorithms in C, AI in LISP, and also touched on Miranda and some others, and I personally did my dissertation using Java. With this range of languages I learnt how to program, not how to program in 'Language X'. It worked, I got a job doing Perl.. a language I'd never seen before.. and was up and running in no time.
And if a U.S. citizen decided to purchase kiddie porn it's his fucking business too? There's no global edict for what is 'evil', although personally I do go along with the commonly held view that kiddie porn is more evil since it's still causing suffering.
France is at least as democratic as the U.S, if the French people feel strongly enough about their rights to purchase Nazi memorabillia let them do it themselves.
Whee.. finally! I get to hack something together to jam all communications in a city-wide area! Finally I get to watch Slashdot and similar sites fall prey to a wonderous Microsoft DoS attack. Finally I get to watch the last vestiges of trust on the Internet get blown out of the window.
I seriously doubt any cable phone company would like to endorse this at the moment, since I seem to recall they make most of their money on long-distance call rates.
He's trusted by them, despite breaking into their machines for years? In my opinion if he'd been told about this for years then maybe, just maybe, he's not a reponsible and trustworthy individual?
Now, what happens if he does trash the email system.. either by plan or accident? Maybe he gets bullied in the classroom tomorrow, and then there's the nice temptation to read the bully's email and act on it..
In my mind no one should have access to servers, especially the email servers, until they have proven they can take responsibility for their own actions. You do this by not breaking into other people's servers.
This is just the geek version of giving someone advanced driving lessons for car theft.
Hmm.. not read about how this version was implemented, but I thought I'd say how *I'd* implement it.
One person is the Server, they run MAME and the Network Server, the others merely run a network client (No MAME).
The clients each send their updates to the server, which then converts these and sends them as keypress events into MAME which is 'fooled' into thinking these are normal local players.
The network server acts as a screen-server, similar to an XServer only far more basic. It obtains MAME's screen image, and sends this to the clients which display it.
This would mean only one copy of MAME running, and no synchronisation worries. The problems with 'pingtimes' would be present anyway, and would really have done in multiple versions of arcade games where 'Timing Is King'.
Hmm.. just wondering how tight the wording is on patents.
The line "Display only the N avatars closest to me" could be 'got around' by displaying only the avatars which are in the forward-facing arc of the player, and close enough that they're possibly visible. Those avatars standing behind you simply won't be seen, even if they are close..
If you can't see the advantages of this then consider how it'll affect medical science when major spinal injuries can be fitted with a 'motivator' unit to allow them to control their own arm. No strange mouth-joystick, just thought. Consider a CCD device being connected to a blind person's optic nerve.
A small light-seeking robot is not a major stepforward in and of itself, what is the step forward is connecting the nerve endings to a microchip directly.
Whether this kind of experimentation should be done is debatable. At the moment I'm thinking 'Yes' since the lamprey is truly dead, and it's only the brainstem that we're using.. when it's a higher lifeform and the entire brain I may reconsider unless they can give convincing reasons why this couldn't be performed on a lower lifeform.
The brain lacks the nerve endings to feel pain itself, this is true. The nerve endings here are wired directly to those photosensors though. I do think the pain centres of the brain are located in the main area though, and so the 'brain stem' (The bit behind and below the brain where the spinal cord in humans) is unable to feel pain in and of itself.
If I remember.. Apache versions up to the current 1.3.x are as you describe, but the RC versions of the Apache 2.0 server are multi-threaded as opposed to multi-process.
Not that I'd expect a machine to have too much trouble running the processes to serve as many MP3s as it's bandwidth would permit, mind.
So now a cracker can hit an exploit a hole in a Microsoft IIS site (Running on Microsoft Windows 2000) and replace the front page with an identical copy, with the malicious code added, then let the people idly browse up to it with their security-compromised Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers.
*Sigh*
It is true, Microsoft do provide complete solutions.
Place Mox Emerald, Tap for red mana.. Place forest, tap for green mana. Use the green Mana to cast Channel, converting nineteen of your lives into mana. Place Mox Ruby, tap for red Mana.. use the two red, and nineteen colourless to cast a twenty point fireball at your opponent to kill them before they get a turn.
Now that, my friend, is true weeniedom!
PS: IANAL, and nor have I played M:tG for a looong time, not sure if the Mox Ruby is actually required!
The way I look at OpenSource I see a lot of very talented programmers and developers, if you're waiting for a way to serve up the content-of-the-day then OpenSource will provide, if you're after a solution. What I don't see in OpenSource though is a lot of talented UI designers..
In my opinion the best user interfaces for OpenSource interfaces are those that don't shy away from borrowing heavily from the proprietry user interfaces that Microsoft, Apple, et al, have been spending their millions of dollars on R&D for. This is not a bad thing, it lets people see what we're aiming to beat, and also let's us see ideas that've taken a lot of time to develop and adopt them.
Now though we have a new thing, here's a company that has good UI designers doing something that the Linux distributors (To name one example) have spent a lot of time trying to do... namely putting a nice userinterface over *nix.
I'm wondering how long it is before we see Linuxconf's style moving closer to that of Darwin. We can now see 'How It Can Work', and know we can do as well as them if we really try.
What I think would be a good idea is if people could somehow 'recruit' those without a grasp of technology to act as testers for us. Maybe they can point'n'click in MacOS or Win9x, but they'd gibber if confronted with the most basic fstab or crontab. We need to know what these people think, and what they want. These are the market that Linux seems determined to win away from Windows, and if it's going to get them it's going to have to bend over backwards to do it. GNOME , KDE and Enlightenment are all nice frontends for the system, but it's when they can do all the stuff (Adding hardward, Kernel configuration, and building programs from tarballs spring to mind) in a simple and easy-to-use way (No, I do *not* consider what we have to be easy to use) we may be able to make the true '*nix for the common man'.
I really can't see the OpenSource GUIs lagging behind Apple too much in the usability stakes for too long, not now they can see 'How to do it'. What'll be more of a challenge is doing it without infringing upon Apple's precious intellectual property.
To be honest part of the reason I think Apple chose BSD over Mach is licensing issues, and GNU purists such as yourself.
The BSD license is far better for what Apple wanted than the GNU one, they wanted a stable *nix OS which they could tailor to build their own proprietry desktop over the top off. If they tried this with something under the GPL they'd have people peering in-depth to see if they could find a way to make Apple OpenSource the Darwin parts of the OS. The GPL would have it's day in court, Apple would lose face amongst the OpenSource people it's relying upon for it's move into *nix.
By chosing to use the BSD license they don't get rabid Stallmanites screaming about them having the 'Proprietry-Software-for-Profit' mentality. Before anyone says Apple are a hardware company and don't their make money on software I'd ask you to consider how many users would prefer an i386 Darwin to a Mac Darwin, and how many sales of candy-coloured-clown computers it'd cost Apple.
With a 3d engine you could end up with 'jaggie' edges, like the trees have with the rest of the backdrop, but this isn't what you get round the figure. The figure had already been anti-aliased, only they'd been anti-aliased onto a white backdrop, when they cut'n'pasted off this they had the problem that there were rogue stray white pixels round the figure, and the edges faded to white. This is not a new problem, designers face this everyday when copying images from stock studio photographs to use elsewhere. What is new is their solution: Don't bother. Given a Photoshop-equipped machine and a bit of time I could have removed the white edges to some reasonable amount, and I'm not a professional designer.
The fact is these were not only faked, but faked badly. Yes, you can easily get better images from a 3d package, or Photoshop, but these didn't do it. The artifacts round the character are definately those of copying off a white background though, I somehow don't think nVidia are suddenly going to build chips that randomly add white pixels round a character, and alias the surrounding character pixels to them and not the background. It's pathetic.
Now the reason this is the 'worst offence' is that in game graphics the amount of polugons, and the shading used on them, is king. nVidia became leaders by throwing more polygons round in a reasonable time than their competitors. The face on this screenshot is pretty much what I'd expect from a pre-render for a 3d package.. the actual polygon quality is far in excess of what most games have at the moment. Yes, XBox will be capable of doing some quite incredible 3d tricks (Having read, and salivated, at the specs for the GeForce3 I can tell nVidia is doing some good stuff) but it won't be capable of this. That's the problem, the face is too good, and claiming it's an actual screenshot is a blatant lie.
This is like a newspaper doctoring the image of President Bush to actually show devil's horns sticking out of the top of his head, and claiming it's an actual photograph. No matter what your politics, or viewpoint, what was done here was lying- not marketing. It's simple.
I'd say that calling in the cops made sense in this case, at least as far as the administration were concerned. Would you really fancy confronting someone who may, just may, actually have the shotgun in the Adidas bag? Would you like to answer to the police afterwards as to why you didn't call them in earlier? They were doing what both their job and their conscience would have told them to do.
This isn't abdicating authority, this is taking responsibility.
New evidence of low-level life on Mars
on
The Dot in .mars
·
· Score: 1
Finally scientists have discovered conclusive proof of simple life on Mars with the recent photos of a collection of used AOL CDs buried deep under the Martian soil
Scientists at NASA are now providing these with broadband capacity to see if they'll troll Slashdot, or if they're actually intelligent.
Maybe next time the authors of a security system will look back on this, and will decide as a result not to release a open standard based on their work?
Yes, changing the name is inconvenient, and yes, it is probably going to end up being legal to keep the name OpenSSH, but the MS lobbying, and the RIAA cases are also legal and inconvenient to the people doing them and most people here don't seem to support them.
Please, let us be careful not to ostracise the people that actually write the open standards that OpenSource relies on. The author of SSH was kind enough to let us use the protocol, let us respect the work he put in by putting in the work of changing the name OpenSSH to something else.. and remembering the new name
It's worth a fair bit if it is a genuine advance over your competitors, so people are using your fan instead of theirs as a result./.'ers are probably one of the groups most likely to 'get this' I'd feel, assembling your own systems can mean you're a lot more likely to build brand-loyalty to a fan manufacturer than a 'normal' user.
Lawyers cost, but losing the technology that seperates you from your competitors can cost you your perceived 'Edge', and thus your customers, and thus your business
I seem to vaguely recall a keyboard with a small 8x8 (Or something..) LCD monochrome display on each keycap so the keyboard can be programmed to relabel each key.
Now if I could just remember enough about the thing to make the recollection work we may be onto something.. thought I'd post this in case someone has a better memory of this thing than me.
They won't try and engage hackers in a technical bottom-kicking competition any more than most hackers was to battle them in a lawsuit bottom-kicking competition. Home advantage plays so much, and neither can see the point of competing with the other in something they'll lose when they're confident they can win in others.
What is even more amazing is that this is the kind of bog-standard HTML that any web browser can handle, I can't see anything here that IE would have any trouble with. I think that with a pencil, and a copy of the W3 guidelines, my grandmother would provide a sufficient rendering engine. This is incredibly annoying,.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a Perl programmer, I truly love the language.. all it's little strangenesses and all. As a 'First Language' I'd really not recommend it though, a first language should allow people to learn the basics and also allow it to be easy to apply them to whatever language they ended up using. Java and C++ are similar, this is a useful thing since both are heavily used and someone who truly knows one should be able to pick the other up with minimal trouble. Personally I can see the advantage in doing what my Uni did, teaching the student a wide range of languages.. we had OO training in Eiffel and Ada, first principles in Ada, algorithms in C, AI in LISP, and also touched on Miranda and some others, and I personally did my dissertation using Java. With this range of languages I learnt how to program, not how to program in 'Language X'. It worked, I got a job doing Perl.. a language I'd never seen before.. and was up and running in no time.
I'm English, and I can assure you we don't think GWB has anything in common with Yoda.
And if a U.S. citizen decided to purchase kiddie porn it's his fucking business too? There's no global edict for what is 'evil', although personally I do go along with the commonly held view that kiddie porn is more evil since it's still causing suffering. France is at least as democratic as the U.S, if the French people feel strongly enough about their rights to purchase Nazi memorabillia let them do it themselves.
Whee.. finally! I get to hack something together to jam all communications in a city-wide area! Finally I get to watch Slashdot and similar sites fall prey to a wonderous Microsoft DoS attack. Finally I get to watch the last vestiges of trust on the Internet get blown out of the window.
I seriously doubt any cable phone company would like to endorse this at the moment, since I seem to recall they make most of their money on long-distance call rates.
He's trusted by them, despite breaking into their machines for years? In my opinion if he'd been told about this for years then maybe, just maybe, he's not a reponsible and trustworthy individual?
Now, what happens if he does trash the email system.. either by plan or accident? Maybe he gets bullied in the classroom tomorrow, and then there's the nice temptation to read the bully's email and act on it..
In my mind no one should have access to servers, especially the email servers, until they have proven they can take responsibility for their own actions. You do this by not breaking into other people's servers.
This is just the geek version of giving someone advanced driving lessons for car theft.
Hmm.. not read about how this version was implemented, but I thought I'd say how *I'd* implement it.
One person is the Server, they run MAME and the Network Server, the others merely run a network client (No MAME).
The clients each send their updates to the server, which then converts these and sends them as keypress events into MAME which is 'fooled' into thinking these are normal local players.
The network server acts as a screen-server, similar to an XServer only far more basic. It obtains MAME's screen image, and sends this to the clients which display it.
This would mean only one copy of MAME running, and no synchronisation worries. The problems with 'pingtimes' would be present anyway, and would really have done in multiple versions of arcade games where 'Timing Is King'.
Hmm.. just wondering how tight the wording is on patents.
The line "Display only the N avatars closest to me" could be 'got around' by displaying only the avatars which are in the forward-facing arc of the player, and close enough that they're possibly visible. Those avatars standing behind you simply won't be seen, even if they are close..
If you can't see the advantages of this then consider how it'll affect medical science when major spinal injuries can be fitted with a 'motivator' unit to allow them to control their own arm. No strange mouth-joystick, just thought. Consider a CCD device being connected to a blind person's optic nerve.
A small light-seeking robot is not a major stepforward in and of itself, what is the step forward is connecting the nerve endings to a microchip directly.
Whether this kind of experimentation should be done is debatable. At the moment I'm thinking 'Yes' since the lamprey is truly dead, and it's only the brainstem that we're using.. when it's a higher lifeform and the entire brain I may reconsider unless they can give convincing reasons why this couldn't be performed on a lower lifeform.
The brain lacks the nerve endings to feel pain itself, this is true. The nerve endings here are wired directly to those photosensors though. I do think the pain centres of the brain are located in the main area though, and so the 'brain stem' (The bit behind and below the brain where the spinal cord in humans) is unable to feel pain in and of itself.
If I remember.. Apache versions up to the current 1.3.x are as you describe, but the RC versions of the Apache 2.0 server are multi-threaded as opposed to multi-process. Not that I'd expect a machine to have too much trouble running the processes to serve as many MP3s as it's bandwidth would permit, mind.
So now a cracker can hit an exploit a hole in a Microsoft IIS site (Running on Microsoft Windows 2000) and replace the front page with an identical copy, with the malicious code added, then let the people idly browse up to it with their security-compromised Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers.
*Sigh*
It is true, Microsoft do provide complete solutions.
Pah,
Place Mox Emerald, Tap for red mana.. Place forest, tap for green mana. Use the green Mana to cast Channel, converting nineteen of your lives into mana. Place Mox Ruby, tap for red Mana.. use the two red, and nineteen colourless to cast a twenty point fireball at your opponent to kill them before they get a turn.
Now that, my friend, is true weeniedom!
PS: IANAL, and nor have I played M:tG for a looong time, not sure if the Mox Ruby is actually required!
The way I look at OpenSource I see a lot of very talented programmers and developers, if you're waiting for a way to serve up the content-of-the-day then OpenSource will provide, if you're after a solution. What I don't see in OpenSource though is a lot of talented UI designers..
In my opinion the best user interfaces for OpenSource interfaces are those that don't shy away from borrowing heavily from the proprietry user interfaces that Microsoft, Apple, et al, have been spending their millions of dollars on R&D for. This is not a bad thing, it lets people see what we're aiming to beat, and also let's us see ideas that've taken a lot of time to develop and adopt them.
Now though we have a new thing, here's a company that has good UI designers doing something that the Linux distributors (To name one example) have spent a lot of time trying to do... namely putting a nice userinterface over *nix.
I'm wondering how long it is before we see Linuxconf's style moving closer to that of Darwin. We can now see 'How It Can Work', and know we can do as well as them if we really try.
What I think would be a good idea is if people could somehow 'recruit' those without a grasp of technology to act as testers for us. Maybe they can point'n'click in MacOS or Win9x, but they'd gibber if confronted with the most basic fstab or crontab. We need to know what these people think, and what they want. These are the market that Linux seems determined to win away from Windows, and if it's going to get them it's going to have to bend over backwards to do it. GNOME , KDE and Enlightenment are all nice frontends for the system, but it's when they can do all the stuff (Adding hardward, Kernel configuration, and building programs from tarballs spring to mind) in a simple and easy-to-use way (No, I do *not* consider what we have to be easy to use) we may be able to make the true '*nix for the common man'.
I really can't see the OpenSource GUIs lagging behind Apple too much in the usability stakes for too long, not now they can see 'How to do it'. What'll be more of a challenge is doing it without infringing upon Apple's precious intellectual property.
To be honest part of the reason I think Apple chose BSD over Mach is licensing issues, and GNU purists such as yourself.
The BSD license is far better for what Apple wanted than the GNU one, they wanted a stable *nix OS which they could tailor to build their own proprietry desktop over the top off. If they tried this with something under the GPL they'd have people peering in-depth to see if they could find a way to make Apple OpenSource the Darwin parts of the OS. The GPL would have it's day in court, Apple would lose face amongst the OpenSource people it's relying upon for it's move into *nix.
By chosing to use the BSD license they don't get rabid Stallmanites screaming about them having the 'Proprietry-Software-for-Profit' mentality. Before anyone says Apple are a hardware company and don't their make money on software I'd ask you to consider how many users would prefer an i386 Darwin to a Mac Darwin, and how many sales of candy-coloured-clown computers it'd cost Apple.
With a 3d engine you could end up with 'jaggie' edges, like the trees have with the rest of the backdrop, but this isn't what you get round the figure. The figure had already been anti-aliased, only they'd been anti-aliased onto a white backdrop, when they cut'n'pasted off this they had the problem that there were rogue stray white pixels round the figure, and the edges faded to white. This is not a new problem, designers face this everyday when copying images from stock studio photographs to use elsewhere. What is new is their solution: Don't bother. Given a Photoshop-equipped machine and a bit of time I could have removed the white edges to some reasonable amount, and I'm not a professional designer.
The fact is these were not only faked, but faked badly. Yes, you can easily get better images from a 3d package, or Photoshop, but these didn't do it. The artifacts round the character are definately those of copying off a white background though, I somehow don't think nVidia are suddenly going to build chips that randomly add white pixels round a character, and alias the surrounding character pixels to them and not the background. It's pathetic.
Now the reason this is the 'worst offence' is that in game graphics the amount of polugons, and the shading used on them, is king. nVidia became leaders by throwing more polygons round in a reasonable time than their competitors. The face on this screenshot is pretty much what I'd expect from a pre-render for a 3d package.. the actual polygon quality is far in excess of what most games have at the moment. Yes, XBox will be capable of doing some quite incredible 3d tricks (Having read, and salivated, at the specs for the GeForce3 I can tell nVidia is doing some good stuff) but it won't be capable of this. That's the problem, the face is too good, and claiming it's an actual screenshot is a blatant lie.
This is like a newspaper doctoring the image of President Bush to actually show devil's horns sticking out of the top of his head, and claiming it's an actual photograph. No matter what your politics, or viewpoint, what was done here was lying- not marketing. It's simple.
I'd say that calling in the cops made sense in this case, at least as far as the administration were concerned. Would you really fancy confronting someone who may, just may, actually have the shotgun in the Adidas bag? Would you like to answer to the police afterwards as to why you didn't call them in earlier? They were doing what both their job and their conscience would have told them to do. This isn't abdicating authority, this is taking responsibility.
Finally scientists have discovered conclusive proof of simple life on Mars with the recent photos of a collection of used AOL CDs buried deep under the Martian soil
Scientists at NASA are now providing these with broadband capacity to see if they'll troll Slashdot, or if they're actually intelligent.
Maybe next time the authors of a security system will look back on this, and will decide as a result not to release a open standard based on their work?
Yes, changing the name is inconvenient, and yes, it is probably going to end up being legal to keep the name OpenSSH, but the MS lobbying, and the RIAA cases are also legal and inconvenient to the people doing them and most people here don't seem to support them.
Please, let us be careful not to ostracise the people that actually write the open standards that OpenSource relies on. The author of SSH was kind enough to let us use the protocol, let us respect the work he put in by putting in the work of changing the name OpenSSH to something else.. and remembering the new name
It's worth a fair bit if it is a genuine advance over your competitors, so people are using your fan instead of theirs as a result. /.'ers are probably one of the groups most likely to 'get this' I'd feel, assembling your own systems can mean you're a lot more likely to build brand-loyalty to a fan manufacturer than a 'normal' user.
Lawyers cost, but losing the technology that seperates you from your competitors can cost you your perceived 'Edge', and thus your customers, and thus your business
Molt
Hmm.. methinks maybe the hallowed Professor has maybe decided that 'plain text' is UNICODE?
It makes 8:1 compression ratios that much more within the grasp of mortal man
Molt
Damn, does this mean we can't poke the patent office in the eye with a pointy stick without paying royalties?
Molt
I seem to vaguely recall a keyboard with a small 8x8 (Or something..) LCD monochrome display on each keycap so the keyboard can be programmed to relabel each key.
Now if I could just remember enough about the thing to make the recollection work we may be onto something.. thought I'd post this in case someone has a better memory of this thing than me.
Molt
They won't try and engage hackers in a technical bottom-kicking competition any more than most hackers was to battle them in a lawsuit bottom-kicking competition. Home advantage plays so much, and neither can see the point of competing with the other in something they'll lose when they're confident they can win in others.
What is even more amazing is that this is the kind of bog-standard HTML that any web browser can handle, I can't see anything here that IE would have any trouble with. I think that with a pencil, and a copy of the W3 guidelines, my grandmother would provide a sufficient rendering engine. This is incredibly annoying,.