I will gladly store some of the waste on my backyard, if I don't have to be responsible of guarding the stuff.
In fact, so would I if it was reasonably contained. It would of course not solve the problem that we worldwide pile up tons and tons of useless, incredibly deadly stuff that we don't know anything better to do with than to store until it eventually gets safer by itself, in a couple of thousand years or so.
Personally, I think I'd been a bit pissed if I had to store lethal shit that was produced because the Vikings didn't think things through.
But then again, that's not our problem, it's only a problem for future generations who haven't even been born yet. They don't have much of a voice.
I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada.
Amen to that. And it got me thinking again.
It's funny in a way. All across the world the same thinking is prevalent (I do not accuse the previous poster of thinking like this). "Nuclear power is good and safe and perfect, but don't even think of storing all the waste near where I live!"
It kind of takes the edge of people's strong position for nuclear power. Accepting risks is always easy when it's not yourself taking the risk.
I personally do not oppose nuclear power. It's better than the current alternatives (no pun intended;-). But there is a way to lessen nuclear waste: save power.
From what I've seen from here across the pond, there doesn't really seem to be a strong discussion in the US whether nuclear power (or any other power for that matter) is good or bad. People just simply consume enormous amounts of electrical power because it's there in the socket and just waiting to be consumed.
At least in Sweden, low-power lamps, TV:s with negligible stand-by power consumption and other similar products sell. Saving energy is something positive, something people want. Consumers can even accept a slight price increase if it means that we save energy. And part of that is that people know there's no way of disposing of nuclear waste.
The US seems to be dominated by a) big power companies that tells people to consume and b) overzealous protest groups that nobody takes seriously. And that's really sad, because the US is such a large country...
Not least was this visible, of course, when the neighbouring global problem with carbondioxide emissions was discussed recently. About every nation except the US (which by itself makes something like 25% of the worlds CO2-emissions if memory serves) accepted taking steps to reduce the emissions. The US had powerful oil companies which saw a potential risk of losing profit, and refused. Of course the public argument was something like "we won't reduce emissions because X won't", where X is your country of choice. Weak argument in the eyes of global climate.
Perhaps we can hope that the same oil companies will be put out of business because of creative bookkeeping. That would be a win for the world.;-)
Intuitive from Intuition, (knowledge obtained from) an ability to understand or know something immediately without needing to think about it, learn it or discover it by using reason. [From Cambridge International Dictionary of English]
Twice before I've been involved in discussions on Slashdot about Blender's interface. Twice before have a very strong argument from those who like the interface been that it's incredibly intuitive once you learn it. Two wrongs obviously does not make a right.
Please stop abusing the word "intuitive". Sit down for a moment, using a dictionary if necessary, and think about what "intuitive" means. Then use a better word such as "powerful", or a term like "it's obvious once you've learned it" in these cases.
English is a very rich language, please keep it that way.
The big advantage of the current system, at
least when it comes to the 60 minutes in an hour,
is that it's easily divisible. You can take
the 60 minutes and divide them into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12 or 15 equally and usefully sized timespans without having to use fractions.
With 100 minutes in an hour, you'd be stuck
to dividing into 2, 4 or 5, 10 equal parts. That's
a big problem with metric time.
Perhaps it was also one of many reasons that Swatch Time (a.k.a. "Internet time", a.k.a. "beats") didn't catch on when it was concieved a number of years ago. It had 1000 beats per day, which is about 1.25 minutes.
The biggest drawbacks, IMO, of most non-metric systems are that they contain a lot of
unnecessary in-between units. Time doesn't in most languages, at least not to the same extent. There are seconds, then minutes, then hours, then days. There are ordinarily no extra units that represent e.g. 24 minutes, 20 hours or one-and-three-quarters of a day. Time is one of
the cleanest non-metric systems we have.
One point where I feel I would benefit from time metrification is months. Having the same number of days per month (apart from probably one of them) would be a lot simpler than todays braindead (but, of course, historically explainable) system.
As I see it, I can understand that people won't pay up. Looking at Windows, PalmOS and MacOSX shareware markets the same trend is obvious: The majority of today's shareware seems to be minute utilities, that performs one very simple task and costs $15.
I can definately understand that people get a very strange idea of the Shareware market. Originally, Shareware was fully functional and often complex software packages that the author asked $10 or so for. Today it's often nagware or crippleware (i.e. not at all fully functional software), and the price is often set way to high.
Of course people get the idea that Shareware is (somewhat exaggerated) "expensive crap".
I think that if the Shareware market cleaned itself up, by making sure that crap software, or very simple software, is released as PD (or Open Source) as it "should", and also making sure that the prices asked are, in fact, cheap, things could be very different.
I personally am glad to pay $10 for a better datebook for my Palm, but I won't pay $15 for a program that edits one entry in the Windows registry. And the very fact that so many people release shareware waaay to expensively puts me off the entire market.
Yeah, and it's bad to have a display that supports "color", because it's hard to edit text that is constantly flashing in rainbow colors while you're working.
The main difference there would perhaps be that examples and screenshots for the color displays generally do not include flashing rainbow text, whereas just about every example use and screenshot of transparent windows I've seen this far has text that cannot be read because the contents of the window below interferes.
That might of course be an error of the "screenshotters" rather than the functionality in itself. It could also be a strong sign that there really aren't all that many good things you can do with it.
Consider an application-switching mechanism that lets you hold a key to fade all windows, at which point you can select a window to bring to front.
This is honestly the first example use of alpha-blending windows I have ever seen anybody mention. I would still prefer workspaces, which IMO unnecessitates (sp?) this functionality, but I can see that somebody definately could find that useful.
I would still choose to implement workspaces before alpha-blendable windows. But there is of course the additional effect that alpha-blendning is a lot cooler than workspaces, and therefore more fun to implement.
Unfortunately, everybody is raving on about transparency and how cool it is, apparently without even thinking about how it would make anything better. So perhaps I should just ask for more examples of how alpha-blending in the Windowing System improves usability.
There might be a very good reason it's taken two years for the glass-like windowing system. And that would be that it isn't a good idea.
Sure it looks pretty. It's technically cool. It's very nice eyecandy. But useful? Hardly.
If our desktops were three-dimensional, there would be a point - in that case you could refocus on a window below your current. When refocusing, the frontmost window would be so blurry to you that it didn't interfere with your view of what was behind it.
But desktops aren't 3D (and "fake" 3D doesn't work, refocusing requires that your desktop is not displayed on a single plane, as that plane only has one focus), and you can't refocus. What you get is just a blur of all windows that happen to be ontop of one another (and the background if you have a background/wallpaper image).
I would guess that the only time that transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm that does not offer workspaces or similar. The transparency might help cram an extra three windows onto the screen. Using workspaces you can just put those extra three on another workspace instead.
I have yet to see anybody argue how great it would be if all books were printed on plastic rather than paper, so that we could see through them.
I hope that is far from the only testing they will do.
It is a classical mistake to have a competition with big prizes for cracking any crypto or similar system, and then assume that if nobody succeeded, it must be safe. Money is, after all, the only real motivator in the world, right?
Well, lets say Brandon K Cracker managed to find a way to circumvent the voting system. Let's assume there was a cash-prize of $10k for cracking it.
Would he disclose his success in cracking the system?
The answer is that he most likely would, if (and only if) the value he got out of doing so now would be greater than the value he would get out of disclosing it when Florida already uses the system.
There are lots of people in the world that would pay very handsomely to influence or DoS elections, even in a small country. And when its the american elections, they would pay even better.
Then there's always the possibility that for Brandon money isn't the Grand Only Force that some people think it to be for everybody. Maybe he is in fact politically or religiously a very engaged boy, he might see the potential to use his knowledge for making sure that <insert nasty organization here> wins the next election.
So using this kind of testing to verify security of any system is always a mistake, at least if it is given any large value in the final evaluation.
But of course it doesn't hurt as a part of a much larger evaluation. Some "honest" boy might find a big hole and report it. And, if not else, it is a great way to do "monkey testing" to see if the system crashes under load.
Curl aims to replace HTML, JavaScript, C++ and more. I see two immediate reasons this will not happen, regardless of how good it may be technically.
The first is that Curl is not free (don't stop reading, I'm not a zealot). If you are a commercial entity wishing to publish Curl content, you have to pay Curl Corp. a licensing fee. Writing a free Curl enginge is likely to be irrelevant, as you pay Curl Corp. to use Curl content, not to use their software. HTML, JavaScript, C++, Java and many others are free. Write a compiler or interpreter, and anybody can use them.
To gain widespread use on the web, a language should not require the publisher to pay where the current languages don't. Unless it's incredibly much better than anything available today. It must surely have some real killer features if companies are to be interested in converting their sites to Curl. The larger the company, the less likely they are to convert (Curl licensing is by volume), and the more likely they are to influence what the smaller companies do.
The second reason, and it's a smaller but still relevant question, is cross platform portability. Curl's homepage lists the system requirements as Windows 95/98/NT, Netscape or IE, with Linux and Mac "coming soon". But there are an incredible amount of browsers out there already for platforms that are not on the desktop.
One of the things that made the web great is that it is not dependant on a particular manufacturer to implement their product on a particular platform. Anybody can write a HTML- and JavaScript-browser if they have the time and skills. Opera wouldn't have seen the light of day had Curl been the standard.
Then there's the question of e.g. proxies. There are lots and lots of products in use today that work on HTML, e.g. cacheing and filtering proxies, that will not work with Curl. Whether Curl publishes standards so that proxy/filter manufacturers can implement Curl support remains to be seen. As does whether a proxy counts as a publisher and should thus pay royalties to Curl Corp.
I don't see Curl as a serious replacement for HTML/Java/JavaScript/C++ anytime soon. Perhaps under a modified licensing agreement, with published standards, big corporations would consider a switch and smaller would follow. But for today I don't think Curl stands a chance, regardless of technical merits.
ROT-13 is a specific case of a Caesar-cipher, which it is called since Julius Caesar used them in ancient Rome, I believe.
So, 2000 years old give or take a few hundred...
Of course this bad hacker must be imprisoned for cracking something that's been secret for so long!
Re:Why not not switch?
on
Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 2
Huh????? Ruby is exactly as strict as Python is.
I do not agree. Ruby implements TMTOWTDI, which Python generally doesn't. Perhaps I expressed myself unclearly, so that you interpreted me as meaning loose as in e.g. "loosely typed". I was reffering to syntax.
Let me explain.
Say I want to do something if a certain boolean variable is false. In Python, I do that in this way:
if not var:
dosomething
In Ruby I can select one of four different syntaxes:
if not var
dosomething
end
unless var
dosomething
end
dosomething if not var
dosomething unless var
These four different syntaxes perform exactly the same thing, but uses different keywords in different orders. That is the TMTOWTDI idea, and it makes Ruby a lot "looser" than Python, syntax-wise.
I think the simple answer is that most people are quite happy with the scripting languages they already use.
Many people enjoy Perl, many enjoy Python, some enjoy/bin/tcsh. The latter population should however, needless to say, be put into working camps. Many also enjoy other languages, but I see Ruby mostly as a contender with Python and Perl.
So why should people switch to Ruby? Because they can do everything in Ruby they can in their current choice? Not likely. They can by definition already do that already. Because Ruby has an extensive library of ready-made code? No, because it doesn't have one compared to Perl or Python. Becuse it's a nice language design? Thats not enough reason to learn a completely new language if the one you use does what you want.
I might be prejudiced here, but i basically believe that many who like Perl do so because it's a very free-form (write-only:-) language, suitable for quick hacks. And those who like Python do so because it is a "cleaner" language, suited to write easy-to-read code. Both camps also enjoy the fauna of ready-made objects/functions/classes/modules that lets you do things easily without reimplementing the wheel.
There are probably Perlies that think Perl is a bit too loose, and Pythonettes that think Python is a bit too strict, and these people can probably find a new friend in Ruby once it gets the library support Python and Perl has.
But for most people that are already into Perl or Python, I think that the potential gain of switching languages simply isn't even close to the effort. And most Python-lovers don't want a looser language, just like most Perl-lovers probably don't want a stricter one. They're quite happy with what they've got.
In order for a new language to be able to make it as a strong contender to Python and Perl, I think it would have to supply something that neither language has, but that all programmers want (I can't think of anything matching that criterium at the moment, if I could I would've implemented that super language already!:-) If the language was then inbetween Python and Perl, both sides would have an easier time switching.
But only being between Perl and Python, which is just about everything Ruby seems to be at this point, isn't a reason to switch. It's just an advantage to ease migration if you happen to have something unique. Until Ruby actually invents something that makes it that much more valuable, I think most people will stay with the language they already use.
I do however wish the Ruby developers the best of luck. It is indeed a quite nice language, one I could definately imagine myself switching to if it gave me a clear advantage.
Being the system administrator of the computer system where this player has been developed, I
can guarantee that the authors will not lose any computing privileges. Knowing how the swedish police work, it is also higly unlikely that any confiscation, searches or similar will happen to them. And Chalmers would have a sincerely difficult time getting away with any form of academic punishments.
At Chalmers we also have a rather nice lawyer, who actually defends Chalmers (and I want to be defended, it's "my" computer system the MPAA will be after). He also enjoys going to court, if we just get him on the right side.:-)
The thing is that this player has been developed in Sweden. Sweden currently does not have software patents, or any equivalence to the DMCA, and the chance of making this development look like a criminal offence is very very small. Even for the MPAA.
We also have something to use to bend Chalmers back the right way if they seem to mushy against the MPAA - PR. Chalmers gets lots and lots of good PR from this player, and that is an argument that the leadership here can certainly accept.
Although some of us might not visit them often, and some of us may not even like them, the fact that Microsoft is currently not "on the web" is rather big News. It just made national radio news in Sweden, for example.
And all the swedish online papers have small articles, complete with rumors of hackers having brought the DNS down and replies from Microsoft representatives saying that they "have no information about that, just that the DNS is to blame".
Altough some of us occasionally degrade ourselves by Microsoft-bashing, I don't think that anybody in the computer industry could close their eyes to the fact that if microsoft.com and hotmail.com are wiped from the face of the net, its big news.
And we don't even have to tell people that evil Linux-activists brought it down or that Microsoft has incompetent staff, or that the moon is in the phase where these things happen, we could just plainly say that Microsoft's DNS is down, and that it has some significance in the world of today.
/Viktor...
Translation is wrong in the article.
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 3
When translating the article, "opt-in" and "opt-out" have been mixed up.
Opt-out means that I have to send my address to a register in order not to receive spam. Sweden has this system, and it does not work well.
Norway has chosen an opt-in system, which means that I have to actively request the advertisement from the spammer. If they can't show that I've requested the mail, they are acting against the law.
The translation mentions opt-out, which is wrong.
Norway's new law also covers advertisements sent via SMS, the instant messaging service in the GSM mobile telephone net.
So Fraunhofer, without whom we wouldn't have the MP3 format to begin with, is developing a new, improved format. To me that would seem like great news. I can fit twice as much music on my harddisk as I do today.
And the immediate comment by Slashdot is "But what about LAME?!". Aren't we being just a tad narrow-minded here? What the article subject says to me is "Fraunhofer is developing something new, which is bad because we've just managed to legally use the last thing they did."
Fraunhofer developed mp3. Had slashdot been around by then, it would probably have considered that to be really, really bad news because of the license. But, yet, I can listen to mp3:s today. The development of mp3 wasn't a bad thing in the long run, and there's nothing that indicates that the development mp3PRO would be bad in the long run either.
Couldn't we try to be just a bit positive about new inventions and developments instead?! Even if the inventions aren't made by three happy hackers in a University basement?
[Jon Katz is] still the number one reason to quit slashdot.
Excuse me, but I am uncertain if you could handle quitting. You, and many other slashdotters that complain about JonKatz, whatever he has to say, actually needs him.
If he weren't around, you would have nobody to be fanatically anti towards. And it is so much more difficult to define yourself from what you actually think than to define yourself from what you definately do not think (JonKatz thinks dididatt, so I think the opposite!)
Those who actually just plainly disagree with Jon, filter him out in the preferences and ignore him. But some people simply can't just ignore him.
They seem to have Jon as an integral part of their ideological thinking. If Jon stopped posting, they'd have no idea what to think, because now they just think opposite of Jon Katz. But they can't admit needing him, so they post comments like that they'll quit slashdot because of Jon.
Jeez. If they can't handle someone with other opinions than themselves, I for one won't miss their presence on slashdot. Go ahead, quit.
It's wonderful that the USA finally wakes up to notice this wonderful mobile-phone technology. In Europe, we've had it for about ten years. Over here we're just planning to install the next generation of mobile technology, so I think you can get hold of lots of very fine second hand GSM-cells.
Do you have *any* evidence of this or was this something you heard from a friend of a friend?
It was really big in the News here in Sweden when it happened. The swedish government have by now modified swedish law because of the CoS story.
Of course, one could claim that the CoS had every right to be pissed off. The most secret of their documents were made public, and people will not join a movement (religious or otherwise) if they read in its bible about space emperors from ten million years ago dumping crippled angels in an earthly volcano. You need several years of education inside the movement before you can accept such a story. Perhaps it's just metaphores, and you therefore cannot understand what the story is really about until you've been properly trained.
I don't know, and I don't intend to find out. As long as the CoS follows the law (and does not infiltrate governments etc), let them do what they want. But when they attempt to take over the world, it might be a good idea to react. It is probably even better to react some time before, lest your reactions be in vain.
And even if the stories to which you referr are somewhat exaggerated, I think that can be OK if it makes people aware that there might be a problem. After all, stories posted anonymously hopefully aren't taken fully seriously anyways.
Frankly, I do understand the German government's fears, although perhaps a bit exaggerated. I am truly glad that there is at least one government that dares fight CoS.
Why am I negative against CoS? Aren't they just another church? Not in my view. A few years back the CoS managed to get the Swedish goverment to break against the Swedish constitution, to preserve the "secrets" of the CoS Bible. They did this through one of their members, an american congressman.
This congressman wrote a very sharp and direct official letter to the Swedish government, threatening with all kinds of retributions unless they made a decision that was (and is) against the swedish consistution, namely to make the CoS Bible secret although it, through clever usage of Swedish law, had been made a public document.
The swedish government yielded to that threat, because the USA is a powerful nation. The congressman, when asked about the letter afterwards, could "not remember writing such a letter"...
Anyways, a "church" that powerful and defensive is not a healthy thing. Politicians that easily convinced to make official threats on account of their religious leaders isn't either.
So I can understand the German government. By making sure that absolutely nothing in official use is made by or (ideally) even influenced by the CoS, the risks of them overtaking (or perhaps rahter "affecting") important parts of the country's affairs is significantly lessend.
I only wish that the U.S.A. would take similar measures. After all, that's where the problem^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCoS originated.
/Viktor...
Re:Python to perl interpreter
on
Perl 6 Showcase
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· Score: 1
[...] so that _any_ syntax could conceivably be used.. More importantly, the parser itself can be
dynamically extended. The best part is that each module could use it's own syntax independantly of other modules
(scope-based parsing). So I could literraly load in Java source-code or Python source code through a use statement..
Perl's weakest point is already that it is a write-only language. To write Perl, you must know just one, say, if-like construct. To read somebody else's code, you have to know all the constructs (s)he used. In effect, to read Perl you have to know every if-like construct, every semibizarre loop syntax, the entire language.
And now, to make things better, every single Perl programmer is to be given the option of easily creating his own syntax for the programs he writes?!
The author has a point in that many people do the same thing over and over.
I have, like just about everybody else at some point in their programmer's lives, begun writing a text editor. So, why make the 180th text editing utility? Let's have a look at possible reasons for starting it.
First, although there are 179 editors, about 177 of them have the same user interface - emacs's. 177 people have thought that the only really good thing about emacs is it's user interface. I, for one, do not agree. I think emacs's strength is the ability to extend it, a feature which almost all the 177 have removed while retaining the user interface.
So that is a reason to start a new project. All the others have the same user interface, and I happen to think that e.g. Boxer or even MS-DOS 'edit' are friendlier. I like the idea of menus, even in console apps. And I like the idea of them being the main interface to various tasks.
Second is extendibility. Emacs has it, but unfortunately in a language with which I'm not best friends. Reading emacs's documentation says, basically, "the only way to write a new major mode is to take one that somebody else has written and modify it". The code of all major modes I've seen is very close to unreadable. Understanding them would take an eternity. Learing all 10000 builtin emacs functions would take two.
So, why not write a small editor in C, extendable through shared objects? Surely somebody must have thought of that. Looking through freshmeat and searching google, it seems that those who have, never released their code.
The third, and most important reason, is that almost no single programmer in this world seems to document their programs. Sure I can download an editor. But how does it work? Use the source, Luke, 'cause there ain't a single line of documentation. Comments in the code perhaps, but hardly anybody takes the time to write a clear description of how everything fits together, which function does what and how they interact, which standards (if any...) have been used in naming the functions, which data structures there are and how they work, etc.
The result? It takes about as long time (or so it feels) to write it from scratch as it would take to read and understand the pre-existing code.
The main reasons behind my futile attempt at yet another text editing utility are therefore:
This editor will not have emacs's or vi's interface, but will be similar to Boxer, something about two or three of the 179 existing editors have.
This editor will be extendable through shared objects. You just compile your.so and load it to get a new mode/whatever.
This editor will have documented code. All functions and their interactions will be documented, even at a high level. There will even be code documentation outside of.c-files.
I will learn a lot writing it, especially the.so parts.
If there is already an editor with those features, I couldn't find it. Trust me, I looked. Writing curses code to manage console-mode menus isn't exactly my idea of fun.:-) I would gladly have taken an editor that worked like I liked and then extended it with the.so functionality.
Perhaps my reasons are valid, perhaps I'm just trying to enhance my ego similarly to what has been suggested. Who knows.
If Time Warner wants to make sure that the foul trick of region-coding actually works, who's going to stop them? Frankly, the readers of Slashdot can't be the only people in the world who find the region-coding awful. But Time-Warner are so big that they have the power to do exactly what they want. The only people that can stop them are their customers. Politicians no longer have much power over the really huge corporations.
So what have you done? Yes, you there behind the browser window. Have you done anything to lessen the power of the big companies? Have you done anything to, in whatever small way, discourage the usage of region-coding?
Here's a small tip. It is really a silly one, but yet. It is the only kind of pressure you can easily apply. I did this a few months ago, and it was really satisfying. If many people do it, things would change.
I went with my parents to buy them a DVD player. We went into a big TV/Video/DVD/Washing machines/Refrigerator/etc store, and started talking to one of their sales persons. We explained that we were interested in a DVD player. He showed us to the TV/Video department, and started showing us different players. He went on and on about the relative advantages of the different models, and just when we had homed in on this one model, just when he expected us to say "we'll take that one", I dropped the big question: "Of course it's region-free?" He got an anxious look to his face, and said "Well, no..." We looked very disappointed, and he did too. "Are any of these models region-free?" He looked even more sad than before "Well..., no... But really, you don't..." We just said "thanks" and went out of the store.
Next store, same story. And the next. When we had visited the five largest resellers of TV-related equipment in town, I felt like a king. At all five stores, the sales person looked like he had just lost his job when we left. After all, $200-$400 is rather a lot of money, even for a big store. And it showed clearly that they hadn't even thought about the possibility that region-freeness was a sales argument. They didn't know people wanted that. Now they did.
Luckily for my parents, at the sixth store they had a region-free DVD-player, and we bought that.
Now, if the sales persons at all these stores gets one potential buyer a month that leaves because the store does not carry region-free DVD-players, they don't care. If every sales person gets ten such customers a day, they'll do something about it. And Time-Warner and the others will hear about it too, after a while. Retailers will start to complain that they're losing customers due to the region-coding. Sony and the other big manufacturers will get pressure on them to have region-free models, which they can only do if Time-Warner and the others accept it. So they'll pressure Time-Warner to back off.
So what have you done to discourage region-coded DVD-players? The next time you pass a TV-store, pretend you want to buy a DVD-player. Let the sales person go on for a bit, and just when you have "decided" on a model, drop the killer line "It's region-free, of course?" When they have no region-free models, look very, very disappointed, and say something like "Oh, then I'm not interested. And that player looked so nice, so bad it's region coded." and leave. If they, by chance, do have a region-free model, just say that you're interested but that you'll have to think about it, and that you'll come back another day.
Remember, ten people every day could make a difference. Let's show them what we think.
Slashdot Mirror
I will gladly store some of the waste on my backyard, if I don't have to be responsible of guarding the stuff.
In fact, so would I if it was reasonably contained. It would of course not solve the problem that we worldwide pile up tons and tons of useless, incredibly deadly stuff that we don't know anything better to do with than to store until it eventually gets safer by itself, in a couple of thousand years or so.
Personally, I think I'd been a bit pissed if I had to store lethal shit that was produced because the Vikings didn't think things through.
But then again, that's not our problem, it's only a problem for future generations who haven't even been born yet. They don't have much of a voice.
I dunno about you folks, but I'm glad I don't live in Nevada.
Amen to that. And it got me thinking again.
It's funny in a way. All across the world the same thinking is prevalent (I do not accuse the previous poster of thinking like this). "Nuclear power is good and safe and perfect, but don't even think of storing all the waste near where I live!"
It kind of takes the edge of people's strong position for nuclear power. Accepting risks is always easy when it's not yourself taking the risk.
I personally do not oppose nuclear power. It's better than the current alternatives (no pun intended ;-). But there is a way to lessen nuclear waste: save power.
From what I've seen from here across the pond, there doesn't really seem to be a strong discussion in the US whether nuclear power (or any other power for that matter) is good or bad. People just simply consume enormous amounts of electrical power because it's there in the socket and just waiting to be consumed.
At least in Sweden, low-power lamps, TV:s with negligible stand-by power consumption and other similar products sell. Saving energy is something positive, something people want. Consumers can even accept a slight price increase if it means that we save energy. And part of that is that people know there's no way of disposing of nuclear waste.
The US seems to be dominated by a) big power companies that tells people to consume and b) overzealous protest groups that nobody takes seriously. And that's really sad, because the US is such a large country...
Not least was this visible, of course, when the neighbouring global problem with carbondioxide emissions was discussed recently. About every nation except the US (which by itself makes something like 25% of the worlds CO2-emissions if memory serves) accepted taking steps to reduce the emissions. The US had powerful oil companies which saw a potential risk of losing profit, and refused. Of course the public argument was something like "we won't reduce emissions because X won't", where X is your country of choice. Weak argument in the eyes of global climate.
Perhaps we can hope that the same oil companies will be put out of business because of creative bookkeeping. That would be a win for the world. ;-)
Intuitive from Intuition, (knowledge obtained from) an ability to understand or know something immediately without needing to think about it, learn it or discover it by using reason. [From Cambridge International Dictionary of English]
Twice before I've been involved in discussions on Slashdot about Blender's interface. Twice before have a very strong argument from those who like the interface been that it's incredibly intuitive once you learn it. Two wrongs obviously does not make a right.
Please stop abusing the word "intuitive". Sit down for a moment, using a dictionary if necessary, and think about what "intuitive" means. Then use a better word such as "powerful", or a term like "it's obvious once you've learned it" in these cases.
English is a very rich language, please keep it that way.
The big advantage of the current system, at least when it comes to the 60 minutes in an hour, is that it's easily divisible. You can take the 60 minutes and divide them into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12 or 15 equally and usefully sized timespans without having to use fractions.
With 100 minutes in an hour, you'd be stuck to dividing into 2, 4 or 5, 10 equal parts. That's a big problem with metric time.
Perhaps it was also one of many reasons that Swatch Time (a.k.a. "Internet time", a.k.a. "beats") didn't catch on when it was concieved a number of years ago. It had 1000 beats per day, which is about 1.25 minutes.
The biggest drawbacks, IMO, of most non-metric systems are that they contain a lot of unnecessary in-between units. Time doesn't in most languages, at least not to the same extent. There are seconds, then minutes, then hours, then days. There are ordinarily no extra units that represent e.g. 24 minutes, 20 hours or one-and-three-quarters of a day. Time is one of the cleanest non-metric systems we have.
One point where I feel I would benefit from time metrification is months. Having the same number of days per month (apart from probably one of them) would be a lot simpler than todays braindead (but, of course, historically explainable) system.
I can definately understand that people get a very strange idea of the Shareware market. Originally, Shareware was fully functional and often complex software packages that the author asked $10 or so for. Today it's often nagware or crippleware (i.e. not at all fully functional software), and the price is often set way to high.
Of course people get the idea that Shareware is (somewhat exaggerated) "expensive crap".
I think that if the Shareware market cleaned itself up, by making sure that crap software, or very simple software, is released as PD (or Open Source) as it "should", and also making sure that the prices asked are, in fact, cheap, things could be very different.
I personally am glad to pay $10 for a better datebook for my Palm, but I won't pay $15 for a program that edits one entry in the Windows registry. And the very fact that so many people release shareware waaay to expensively puts me off the entire market.
Yeah, and it's bad to have a display that supports "color", because it's hard to edit text that is constantly flashing in rainbow colors while you're working.
The main difference there would perhaps be that examples and screenshots for the color displays generally do not include flashing rainbow text, whereas just about every example use and screenshot of transparent windows I've seen this far has text that cannot be read because the contents of the window below interferes.
That might of course be an error of the "screenshotters" rather than the functionality in itself. It could also be a strong sign that there really aren't all that many good things you can do with it.
Consider an application-switching mechanism that lets you hold a key to fade all windows, at which point you can select a window to bring to front.
This is honestly the first example use of alpha-blending windows I have ever seen anybody mention. I would still prefer workspaces, which IMO unnecessitates (sp?) this functionality, but I can see that somebody definately could find that useful.
I would still choose to implement workspaces before alpha-blendable windows. But there is of course the additional effect that alpha-blendning is a lot cooler than workspaces, and therefore more fun to implement.
Unfortunately, everybody is raving on about transparency and how cool it is, apparently without even thinking about how it would make anything better. So perhaps I should just ask for more examples of how alpha-blending in the Windowing System improves usability.
There might be a very good reason it's taken two years for the glass-like windowing system. And that would be that it isn't a good idea.
Sure it looks pretty. It's technically cool. It's very nice eyecandy. But useful? Hardly.
If our desktops were three-dimensional, there would be a point - in that case you could refocus on a window below your current. When refocusing, the frontmost window would be so blurry to you that it didn't interfere with your view of what was behind it.
But desktops aren't 3D (and "fake" 3D doesn't work, refocusing requires that your desktop is not displayed on a single plane, as that plane only has one focus), and you can't refocus. What you get is just a blur of all windows that happen to be ontop of one another (and the background if you have a background/wallpaper image).
I would guess that the only time that transparent windows help is if you have an OS/wm that does not offer workspaces or similar. The transparency might help cram an extra three windows onto the screen. Using workspaces you can just put those extra three on another workspace instead.
I have yet to see anybody argue how great it would be if all books were printed on plastic rather than paper, so that we could see through them.
It is a classical mistake to have a competition with big prizes for cracking any crypto or similar system, and then assume that if nobody succeeded, it must be safe. Money is, after all, the only real motivator in the world, right?
Well, lets say Brandon K Cracker managed to find a way to circumvent the voting system. Let's assume there was a cash-prize of $10k for cracking it. Would he disclose his success in cracking the system?
The answer is that he most likely would, if (and only if) the value he got out of doing so now would be greater than the value he would get out of disclosing it when Florida already uses the system.
There are lots of people in the world that would pay very handsomely to influence or DoS elections, even in a small country. And when its the american elections, they would pay even better.
Then there's always the possibility that for Brandon money isn't the Grand Only Force that some people think it to be for everybody. Maybe he is in fact politically or religiously a very engaged boy, he might see the potential to use his knowledge for making sure that <insert nasty organization here> wins the next election.
So using this kind of testing to verify security of any system is always a mistake, at least if it is given any large value in the final evaluation.
But of course it doesn't hurt as a part of a much larger evaluation. Some "honest" boy might find a big hole and report it. And, if not else, it is a great way to do "monkey testing" to see if the system crashes under load.
Just don't trust it.
The first is that Curl is not free (don't stop reading, I'm not a zealot). If you are a commercial entity wishing to publish Curl content, you have to pay Curl Corp. a licensing fee. Writing a free Curl enginge is likely to be irrelevant, as you pay Curl Corp. to use Curl content, not to use their software. HTML, JavaScript, C++, Java and many others are free. Write a compiler or interpreter, and anybody can use them.
To gain widespread use on the web, a language should not require the publisher to pay where the current languages don't. Unless it's incredibly much better than anything available today. It must surely have some real killer features if companies are to be interested in converting their sites to Curl. The larger the company, the less likely they are to convert (Curl licensing is by volume), and the more likely they are to influence what the smaller companies do.
The second reason, and it's a smaller but still relevant question, is cross platform portability. Curl's homepage lists the system requirements as Windows 95/98/NT, Netscape or IE, with Linux and Mac "coming soon". But there are an incredible amount of browsers out there already for platforms that are not on the desktop.
One of the things that made the web great is that it is not dependant on a particular manufacturer to implement their product on a particular platform. Anybody can write a HTML- and JavaScript-browser if they have the time and skills. Opera wouldn't have seen the light of day had Curl been the standard.
Then there's the question of e.g. proxies. There are lots and lots of products in use today that work on HTML, e.g. cacheing and filtering proxies, that will not work with Curl. Whether Curl publishes standards so that proxy/filter manufacturers can implement Curl support remains to be seen. As does whether a proxy counts as a publisher and should thus pay royalties to Curl Corp.
I don't see Curl as a serious replacement for HTML/Java/JavaScript/C++ anytime soon. Perhaps under a modified licensing agreement, with published standards, big corporations would consider a switch and smaller would follow. But for today I don't think Curl stands a chance, regardless of technical merits.
I mean, how old is that cifer ?
ROT-13 is a specific case of a Caesar-cipher, which it is called since Julius Caesar used them in ancient Rome, I believe.
So, 2000 years old give or take a few hundred...
Of course this bad hacker must be imprisoned for cracking something that's been secret for so long!
Huh????? Ruby is exactly as strict as Python is.
I do not agree. Ruby implements TMTOWTDI, which Python generally doesn't. Perhaps I expressed myself unclearly, so that you interpreted me as meaning loose as in e.g. "loosely typed". I was reffering to syntax.
Let me explain.
Say I want to do something if a certain boolean variable is false. In Python, I do that in this way:
if not var:
dosomething
In Ruby I can select one of four different syntaxes:
if not var
dosomething
end
unless var
dosomething
end
dosomething if not var
dosomething unless var
These four different syntaxes perform exactly the same thing, but uses different keywords in different orders. That is the TMTOWTDI idea, and it makes Ruby a lot "looser" than Python, syntax-wise.
I think the simple answer is that most people are quite happy with the scripting languages they already use.
Many people enjoy Perl, many enjoy Python, some enjoy /bin/tcsh. The latter population should however, needless to say, be put into working camps. Many also enjoy other languages, but I see Ruby mostly as a contender with Python and Perl.
So why should people switch to Ruby? Because they can do everything in Ruby they can in their current choice? Not likely. They can by definition already do that already. Because Ruby has an extensive library of ready-made code? No, because it doesn't have one compared to Perl or Python. Becuse it's a nice language design? Thats not enough reason to learn a completely new language if the one you use does what you want.
I might be prejudiced here, but i basically believe that many who like Perl do so because it's a very free-form (write-only :-) language, suitable for quick hacks. And those who like Python do so because it is a "cleaner" language, suited to write easy-to-read code. Both camps also enjoy the fauna of ready-made objects/functions/classes/modules that lets you do things easily without reimplementing the wheel.
There are probably Perlies that think Perl is a bit too loose, and Pythonettes that think Python is a bit too strict, and these people can probably find a new friend in Ruby once it gets the library support Python and Perl has.
But for most people that are already into Perl or Python, I think that the potential gain of switching languages simply isn't even close to the effort. And most Python-lovers don't want a looser language, just like most Perl-lovers probably don't want a stricter one. They're quite happy with what they've got.
In order for a new language to be able to make it as a strong contender to Python and Perl, I think it would have to supply something that neither language has, but that all programmers want (I can't think of anything matching that criterium at the moment, if I could I would've implemented that super language already! :-) If the language was then inbetween Python and Perl, both sides would have an easier time switching.
But only being between Perl and Python, which is just about everything Ruby seems to be at this point, isn't a reason to switch. It's just an advantage to ease migration if you happen to have something unique. Until Ruby actually invents something that makes it that much more valuable, I think most people will stay with the language they already use.
I do however wish the Ruby developers the best of luck. It is indeed a quite nice language, one I could definately imagine myself switching to if it gave me a clear advantage.
At Chalmers we also have a rather nice lawyer, who actually defends Chalmers (and I want to be defended, it's "my" computer system the MPAA will be after). He also enjoys going to court, if we just get him on the right side. :-)
The thing is that this player has been developed in Sweden. Sweden currently does not have software patents, or any equivalence to the DMCA, and the chance of making this development look like a criminal offence is very very small. Even for the MPAA.
We also have something to use to bend Chalmers back the right way if they seem to mushy against the MPAA - PR. Chalmers gets lots and lots of good PR from this player, and that is an argument that the leadership here can certainly accept.
And all the swedish online papers have small articles, complete with rumors of hackers having brought the DNS down and replies from Microsoft representatives saying that they "have no information about that, just that the DNS is to blame".
Altough some of us occasionally degrade ourselves by Microsoft-bashing, I don't think that anybody in the computer industry could close their eyes to the fact that if microsoft.com and hotmail.com are wiped from the face of the net, its big news.
And we don't even have to tell people that evil Linux-activists brought it down or that Microsoft has incompetent staff, or that the moon is in the phase where these things happen, we could just plainly say that Microsoft's DNS is down, and that it has some significance in the world of today.
Opt-out means that I have to send my address to a register in order not to receive spam. Sweden has this system, and it does not work well.
Norway has chosen an opt-in system, which means that I have to actively request the advertisement from the spammer. If they can't show that I've requested the mail, they are acting against the law.
The translation mentions opt-out, which is wrong.
Norway's new law also covers advertisements sent via SMS, the instant messaging service in the GSM mobile telephone net.
And the immediate comment by Slashdot is "But what about LAME?!". Aren't we being just a tad narrow-minded here? What the article subject says to me is "Fraunhofer is developing something new, which is bad because we've just managed to legally use the last thing they did."
Fraunhofer developed mp3. Had slashdot been around by then, it would probably have considered that to be really, really bad news because of the license. But, yet, I can listen to mp3:s today. The development of mp3 wasn't a bad thing in the long run, and there's nothing that indicates that the development mp3PRO would be bad in the long run either.
Couldn't we try to be just a bit positive about new inventions and developments instead?! Even if the inventions aren't made by three happy hackers in a University basement?
Sweden hasn't been to war since the 1850's. When was the last time the US went to war? And before that?
Excuse me, but I am uncertain if you could handle quitting. You, and many other slashdotters that complain about JonKatz, whatever he has to say, actually needs him.
If he weren't around, you would have nobody to be fanatically anti towards. And it is so much more difficult to define yourself from what you actually think than to define yourself from what you definately do not think (JonKatz thinks dididatt, so I think the opposite!)
Those who actually just plainly disagree with Jon, filter him out in the preferences and ignore him. But some people simply can't just ignore him. They seem to have Jon as an integral part of their ideological thinking. If Jon stopped posting, they'd have no idea what to think, because now they just think opposite of Jon Katz. But they can't admit needing him, so they post comments like that they'll quit slashdot because of Jon.
Jeez. If they can't handle someone with other opinions than themselves, I for one won't miss their presence on slashdot. Go ahead, quit.
Welcome to the nineties! :-)
It was really big in the News here in Sweden when it happened. The swedish government have by now modified swedish law because of the CoS story.
Of course, one could claim that the CoS had every right to be pissed off. The most secret of their documents were made public, and people will not join a movement (religious or otherwise) if they read in its bible about space emperors from ten million years ago dumping crippled angels in an earthly volcano. You need several years of education inside the movement before you can accept such a story. Perhaps it's just metaphores, and you therefore cannot understand what the story is really about until you've been properly trained.
I don't know, and I don't intend to find out. As long as the CoS follows the law (and does not infiltrate governments etc), let them do what they want. But when they attempt to take over the world, it might be a good idea to react. It is probably even better to react some time before, lest your reactions be in vain.
And even if the stories to which you referr are somewhat exaggerated, I think that can be OK if it makes people aware that there might be a problem. After all, stories posted anonymously hopefully aren't taken fully seriously anyways.
Why am I negative against CoS? Aren't they just another church? Not in my view. A few years back the CoS managed to get the Swedish goverment to break against the Swedish constitution, to preserve the "secrets" of the CoS Bible. They did this through one of their members, an american congressman.
This congressman wrote a very sharp and direct official letter to the Swedish government, threatening with all kinds of retributions unless they made a decision that was (and is) against the swedish consistution, namely to make the CoS Bible secret although it, through clever usage of Swedish law, had been made a public document.
The swedish government yielded to that threat, because the USA is a powerful nation. The congressman, when asked about the letter afterwards, could "not remember writing such a letter"...
Anyways, a "church" that powerful and defensive is not a healthy thing. Politicians that easily convinced to make official threats on account of their religious leaders isn't either.
So I can understand the German government. By making sure that absolutely nothing in official use is made by or (ideally) even influenced by the CoS, the risks of them overtaking (or perhaps rahter "affecting") important parts of the country's affairs is significantly lessend.
I only wish that the U.S.A. would take similar measures. After all, that's where the problem^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCoS originated.
Perl's weakest point is already that it is a write-only language. To write Perl, you must know just one, say, if-like construct. To read somebody else's code, you have to know all the constructs (s)he used. In effect, to read Perl you have to know every if-like construct, every semibizarre loop syntax, the entire language.
And now, to make things better, every single Perl programmer is to be given the option of easily creating his own syntax for the programs he writes?!
This is not an improvement.
I have, like just about everybody else at some point in their programmer's lives, begun writing a text editor. So, why make the 180th text editing utility? Let's have a look at possible reasons for starting it.
First, although there are 179 editors, about 177 of them have the same user interface - emacs's. 177 people have thought that the only really good thing about emacs is it's user interface. I, for one, do not agree. I think emacs's strength is the ability to extend it, a feature which almost all the 177 have removed while retaining the user interface.
So that is a reason to start a new project. All the others have the same user interface, and I happen to think that e.g. Boxer or even MS-DOS 'edit' are friendlier. I like the idea of menus, even in console apps. And I like the idea of them being the main interface to various tasks.
Second is extendibility. Emacs has it, but unfortunately in a language with which I'm not best friends. Reading emacs's documentation says, basically, "the only way to write a new major mode is to take one that somebody else has written and modify it". The code of all major modes I've seen is very close to unreadable. Understanding them would take an eternity. Learing all 10000 builtin emacs functions would take two.
So, why not write a small editor in C, extendable through shared objects? Surely somebody must have thought of that. Looking through freshmeat and searching google, it seems that those who have, never released their code.
The third, and most important reason, is that almost no single programmer in this world seems to document their programs. Sure I can download an editor. But how does it work? Use the source, Luke, 'cause there ain't a single line of documentation. Comments in the code perhaps, but hardly anybody takes the time to write a clear description of how everything fits together, which function does what and how they interact, which standards (if any...) have been used in naming the functions, which data structures there are and how they work, etc.
The result? It takes about as long time (or so it feels) to write it from scratch as it would take to read and understand the pre-existing code.
The main reasons behind my futile attempt at yet another text editing utility are therefore:
- This editor will not have emacs's or vi's interface, but will be similar to Boxer, something about two or three of the 179 existing editors have.
- This editor will be extendable through shared objects. You just compile your
.so and load it to get a new mode/whatever.
- This editor will have documented code. All functions and their interactions will be documented, even at a high level. There will even be code documentation outside of
.c-files.
- I will learn a lot writing it, especially the
.so parts.
If there is already an editor with those features, I couldn't find it. Trust me, I looked. Writing curses code to manage console-mode menus isn't exactly my idea of fun.Perhaps my reasons are valid, perhaps I'm just trying to enhance my ego similarly to what has been suggested. Who knows.
So what have you done? Yes, you there behind the browser window. Have you done anything to lessen the power of the big companies? Have you done anything to, in whatever small way, discourage the usage of region-coding?
Here's a small tip. It is really a silly one, but yet. It is the only kind of pressure you can easily apply. I did this a few months ago, and it was really satisfying. If many people do it, things would change.
I went with my parents to buy them a DVD player. We went into a big TV/Video/DVD/Washing machines/Refrigerator/etc store, and started talking to one of their sales persons. We explained that we were interested in a DVD player. He showed us to the TV/Video department, and started showing us different players. He went on and on about the relative advantages of the different models, and just when we had homed in on this one model, just when he expected us to say "we'll take that one", I dropped the big question: "Of course it's region-free?" He got an anxious look to his face, and said "Well, no..." We looked very disappointed, and he did too. "Are any of these models region-free?" He looked even more sad than before "Well..., no... But really, you don't..." We just said "thanks" and went out of the store.
Next store, same story. And the next. When we had visited the five largest resellers of TV-related equipment in town, I felt like a king. At all five stores, the sales person looked like he had just lost his job when we left. After all, $200-$400 is rather a lot of money, even for a big store. And it showed clearly that they hadn't even thought about the possibility that region-freeness was a sales argument. They didn't know people wanted that. Now they did.
Luckily for my parents, at the sixth store they had a region-free DVD-player, and we bought that.
Now, if the sales persons at all these stores gets one potential buyer a month that leaves because the store does not carry region-free DVD-players, they don't care. If every sales person gets ten such customers a day, they'll do something about it. And Time-Warner and the others will hear about it too, after a while. Retailers will start to complain that they're losing customers due to the region-coding. Sony and the other big manufacturers will get pressure on them to have region-free models, which they can only do if Time-Warner and the others accept it. So they'll pressure Time-Warner to back off.
So what have you done to discourage region-coded DVD-players? The next time you pass a TV-store, pretend you want to buy a DVD-player. Let the sales person go on for a bit, and just when you have "decided" on a model, drop the killer line "It's region-free, of course?" When they have no region-free models, look very, very disappointed, and say something like "Oh, then I'm not interested. And that player looked so nice, so bad it's region coded." and leave. If they, by chance, do have a region-free model, just say that you're interested but that you'll have to think about it, and that you'll come back another day.
Remember, ten people every day could make a difference. Let's show them what we think.