Right now I'm keeping my fingers crossed that no security holes of similar magnitude in Open Source software are discovered for at least the next few weeks.
Let's face it, every major operating system has security flaws, either in the past or just waiting to be discovered. The benefit of Open Source is not only that it makes it easier for everyone to see its flaws, but it makes it easier for anyone to fix them.
Right now we have Craig Mundie preparing to argue the merits of commercial licenses over Open Source, and having a hole of this magnitude (read the article for details) showing up in closed-source software so close to this debate only serves to make our case look better.
There are times when a closed-source license scheme will work out better for a particular company, and there are times when an open-source one will be better (and I'm only talking in regards to the company, not the rest of society). This security hole will hopefully reduce the FUD level against Open Source software, particularly from a security point of view.
How do you teach someone to use a mouse effectively? (Sure, it seems simple, but think about it a minute. How do you know how far to move a mouse? How fast to double-click?)
Showing someone how to play solitaire on a computer is a great way to help them learn basic mousing skills, while becoming comfortable with the idea of sitting in front of a computer. Pretty much everyone knows the rules behind the game, and it's easier to make the mental leap from playing cards to the graphics on the screen than understanding concepts such as "desktop" and "file", which are abstracted much further.
Whenever I starting teaching someone who is new to computers, I try to make as many comparisons to real life as possible.
For instance, when I explain about the different between RAM and a hard drive, I tell them to thing of the computer as an office desk. The "hard drive" is the file cabinet where everything is kept. The "RAM" is the top of the desk. They can work on as many files at the same time as they can spread out on the top of the desk. Once they run out of desktop space, they need to close up one file, stick it back in the drawer, file the next one, and lay it out again. I tell them that in computer terms this is "swapping", and that's what the computer is doing when it starts getting very slow and you can hear the hard drive making noises...
You know, they might just not have much footage worthy of a DVD from that far back. It certainly wasn't the phenomenon that it became around season 3 or so.
True, but they could at least release the original shorts from the Tracey Ulman show... that's how I was introduced to the Simpsons. There's quite a few people talking about how "crude" the simpsons looked during the first season... that's nothing compaired to the days before they had their own series.
Life in Hell, Matt Groening previous project (comic strip) is still hillarious too...
This is terrific news, but does anyone know if Jython (the version of Python written to run under the Java VM) is also GPL compatible?
According to their license and their sourceforge site the Jython license is OSI-approved, but GPL-compatibility is not quite the same thing.
Jython is cool because it allows Python code to be compiled into Java class files, but you need to distribute those files along with the Jython class files... but if you're distributing them together, doesn't that break the GPL?
Outside of the fighter arena, we are flying seriously old craft in other roles as well. Our air combat support aircraft are ancient and (lacking the sex appeal of new fighters) have not been subjects of serious research in decades (the airframes not the electronic add-ons).
Right on, we have to think of the sex appeal! How are those pretty flyboys like Maverick and his buddy Goose supposed to get laid if their aircraft lack sex appeal?!?
Fuck the economy, fuck aerodynamics, we need sexier jets!
--Cycon
Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence.
the fact that this one is a *different* Microsoft Certificate means you will still be prompted to trust it.
That's all well and good - until I need to install a new system. If I've never run windows update before, and have never been asked to accept a microsoft certificate, how do i know the one i'm receiving is really from microsoft, and not a man-in-the-middle attack, or a dns-spoof?
The only way this will work is if all vendors come together on this and make it happen. Why would they want to do that? There are so many flaovors out there, if we start to standardize, the smaller "flavors" will be eventually out of business and we are back to capitalism at it's finest.
Linux vendors might want to standardize offerings because when it comes to Operating Systems, Linux itself is one of the "smaller flavors."
Besides, standardization doesn't mean that everyone does things the same way, it means that configuration files and binaries can be expected to be found in the same places, using the same formats. This allows individual vendors to create and provide tools which are helpful to everyone. Personally, I'd prefer to see commercial vendors like Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE compete on grounds which don't include different methods for managing users and configuring software. If I wanted to swtich vendors, I don't want to have to learn how to do simple tasks all over again, for the sake of competition.
Of course, the system bombed the next day when he tried to update Java 1.2 to the 1.3 J2SE, so I got to repeat the whole thing again.
Your story is interesting, but it begs the question: What will happen when your friend tries to update something on his Solaris machine? You may be very competent and experienced with Linux, but you make no mention of your friend's ability.
This is not a flame of course; Linux is indeed flawed, and does have a long way to go before it can be considered newbie-friendly. But in my experience, the time required to set up a system is far less important than the time required to maintain a system.
Does anyone know if the Palm OS Emulator runs on the iPaq under Linux? It seems to me that one could have the best of both worlds with that much RAM; the power and flexibility of linux with the application support of the palm.
A billboard in times square, and ads on American TV. It's wonderful that IBM is commiting support by getting behind Linux in the right way, but will this fanfare be equally presented in other countries?
Will televisions in the UK, France, Australia, etc. be showing the same message?
I was considering waiting until the money was right and picking up and iPaq in order work with portatble Python/GTK development, but if Pippy can talk to the PalmOS SDK, i'd much rather write my cross-platform software for the far more popular (and far less expensive) Palm/Visor series of orgranizers.
Slashdotters: And then you must take down the largest corporation in the world. With.....A HERRING!!!!
But WAIT! Isn't that what penguins eat? Herring? And isn't taking down the largest corporation in the world at least one of the goals of many Linux developers out there?
BlackJack can pinpoint the position of its host satellite continuously an accuracy of about one inch, and can be used for a variety of Earth studies.
Throw in an altimeter/barometer and transceiver, and you have the ultimate tracking device. Sure sure, now we can all bitch and moan about evil gov't uses of this... but why not more interesting things, such as putting one on each player in a paintball game? You could then uplink all of the data to a UT/Quake3 server, and people could watch the paintball matches over the internet. Make it lazer tag for even more data aquisition...
--Cycon
Course, i would actually expect to see something like this in the head of a missle, for remote steering...
Tell dave that his game was one of the most amusing pieces of software I've ever run across, Linux or otherwise. I was laughing my ass off... nothing like playing as RMS and killing MS employees after watching the Mallrats-style blueprint loading up...
Furthermore, if we can't see faster than 60 fps, why are the gamers always talking about how their new video card can do 120 fps and such?
Actually, I know the answer to this one. Some of the gamers don't realize that they can only see 60 fps, they just assume that a larger number of frames == better, so they go ga-ga over one-ups-manship.
Of course, the real benefit to having >60 fps on a video card is that during complex scene renders (when you have lots of people on the same screen, or lots of explosions) then the video card is harder-pressed to render all of that detail, and the framerate will drop starkly. The higher your maximum framerate, the higher the framerate will remain when the scene gets complex.
Also, bear in mind that gamers are also looking for higher and higher resolution at that magic 60 fps number. Currently, the highest-end gaming cards can get 1600x1200 @ 60fps... but once you have many characters on the screen at once, the slowdown is going to be visibly noticable as the framerate drops.
But the killer is that video resolution can't touch film. What happens 50 years from now, when we're moving to HDTV-2? It will surely outstrip the limits of video resolution. Lucas's new pet all-video Star Wars saga will look pathetically scaled-up. Yet, anything shot on film will probably still need to be scaled *down* to fit the new standard.
You do realize that this is *Star Wars* you're talking about, right? Take a look at the technology used to create the original Star Wars (the costumes and effect), and take a look at the technology used to advance the story line (the map of the Death Star and C3P0 with wires sticking out everywhere).
The Original Star Wars isn't very impressive compared to contemporary offerings on either side, yet people still enjoy watching the movie. People who will enjoy the next Star Wars (not I -- I wasn't impressed by Episode 1) will still enjoy it in 50 years despite it's campy quality -- afterall, that's what the series is all about -- a campy space opera!
You're also forgetting something else about the advancement of technology. The current limit to visual advancement is the human eye. We can't see faster that 60 fps, we can't distinguish more than 16.77 millions colors, etc. Anyone know what the maximum resolution the human eye can distinguish between might be?
The buttons aren't indistinguishable at all. When the mouse is near the buttons, they have glyphs in them that tell their function.
Fair enough, but here's my counter-arguement:
Why should I have to move my mouse all over the screen (as a brand-new user) in to discover symbols which represent functions I've never encountered before?
This still just seems horribly counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly to me. What If I had placed a small stick in the middle of the road, but when you drove close to it, it turned into a brick wall?
Choosing the graphite look just changes the Aqua widgets to monochrome. For example, the three standard window title bar widgets (close window, minimize window and zoom window) are now all the same graphite gray color, rather then being red, yellow and green.
So wait a second here. Doesn't that mean that the three unmarked buttons at the upper-right of every window will now be even more indistinguishable as to their function? It was a bad enough design decision (this is only my opinion) that you can't tell which color performs which function, but now they're going to removed the color distinction as well?
Isn't this basically the equivalent of taking a keyboard and painting a different color over each key's label, and then deciding that wasn't obscure enough and just paiting them all grey?
The next step of course is that each time you click on one of the buttons, their functions are all randomly shuffled about...
--Cycon
Will the X-Box bring a Light Gun to the PC?
on
Salon on the XBox
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· Score: 2
All Hype and FUD aside, it is my wish that the X-Box will finally bring to the consumer market something which the PC has gone without for far too long:
A standardized light gun. Yes, I know there's a few out there that one can pick up for a hundred bucks or so, but there aren't any games available for the, because there's not standard for PC Light Guns.
There's nothing I love more at the local arcade than plunking down a dollar or so and double-fisting two light guns while blowing away baddies on the big screen. Now if I could only do that in my apartment the guns would pay for themselves inside of one summer...
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse my ignorance of the law here, but he's Russian; is he still protected by the constitution?
--Cycon
No, Hemos doesn't infer that; Prior Restraint does. See the part in quotes? That's not Hemo's writting.
--Cycon
Let's face it, every major operating system has security flaws, either in the past or just waiting to be discovered. The benefit of Open Source is not only that it makes it easier for everyone to see its flaws, but it makes it easier for anyone to fix them.
Right now we have Craig Mundie preparing to argue the merits of commercial licenses over Open Source, and having a hole of this magnitude (read the article for details) showing up in closed-source software so close to this debate only serves to make our case look better.
There are times when a closed-source license scheme will work out better for a particular company, and there are times when an open-source one will be better (and I'm only talking in regards to the company, not the rest of society). This security hole will hopefully reduce the FUD level against Open Source software, particularly from a security point of view.
I can't wait to hear the Mundie debate next week.
--Cycon
Showing someone how to play solitaire on a computer is a great way to help them learn basic mousing skills, while becoming comfortable with the idea of sitting in front of a computer. Pretty much everyone knows the rules behind the game, and it's easier to make the mental leap from playing cards to the graphics on the screen than understanding concepts such as "desktop" and "file", which are abstracted much further.
Whenever I starting teaching someone who is new to computers, I try to make as many comparisons to real life as possible.
For instance, when I explain about the different between RAM and a hard drive, I tell them to thing of the computer as an office desk. The "hard drive" is the file cabinet where everything is kept. The "RAM" is the top of the desk. They can work on as many files at the same time as they can spread out on the top of the desk. Once they run out of desktop space, they need to close up one file, stick it back in the drawer, file the next one, and lay it out again. I tell them that in computer terms this is "swapping", and that's what the computer is doing when it starts getting very slow and you can hear the hard drive making noises...
--Cycon
True, but they could at least release the original shorts from the Tracey Ulman show... that's how I was introduced to the Simpsons. There's quite a few people talking about how "crude" the simpsons looked during the first season... that's nothing compaired to the days before they had their own series.
Life in Hell, Matt Groening previous project (comic strip) is still hillarious too...
--Cycon
According to their license and their sourceforge site the Jython license is OSI-approved, but GPL-compatibility is not quite the same thing.
Jython is cool because it allows Python code to be compiled into Java class files, but you need to distribute those files along with the Jython class files... but if you're distributing them together, doesn't that break the GPL?
--Cycon
Right on, we have to think of the sex appeal! How are those pretty flyboys like Maverick and his buddy Goose supposed to get laid if their aircraft lack sex appeal?!?
Fuck the economy, fuck aerodynamics, we need sexier jets!
--Cycon
Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence.
That's all well and good - until I need to install a new system. If I've never run windows update before, and have never been asked to accept a microsoft certificate, how do i know the one i'm receiving is really from microsoft, and not a man-in-the-middle attack, or a dns-spoof?
--Cycon
Linux vendors might want to standardize offerings because when it comes to Operating Systems, Linux itself is one of the "smaller flavors."
Besides, standardization doesn't mean that everyone does things the same way, it means that configuration files and binaries can be expected to be found in the same places, using the same formats. This allows individual vendors to create and provide tools which are helpful to everyone. Personally, I'd prefer to see commercial vendors like Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE compete on grounds which don't include different methods for managing users and configuring software. If I wanted to swtich vendors, I don't want to have to learn how to do simple tasks all over again, for the sake of competition.
--Cycon
anyone else get the impression that this guy posted anonymously because he's the same guy that wrote the article?
Your story is interesting, but it begs the question: What will happen when your friend tries to update something on his Solaris machine? You may be very competent and experienced with Linux, but you make no mention of your friend's ability.
This is not a flame of course; Linux is indeed flawed, and does have a long way to go before it can be considered newbie-friendly. But in my experience, the time required to set up a system is far less important than the time required to maintain a system.
--Cycon
--Cycon
Will televisions in the UK, France, Australia, etc. be showing the same message?
--Cycon
Hey, that's cool -- can I have your iPaq if you do? Some of us can't afford the buy the latest geek toys...
--Cycon
--Cycon
But WAIT! Isn't that what penguins eat? Herring? And isn't taking down the largest corporation in the world at least one of the goals of many Linux developers out there?
It's all so clear to me now...
--Cycon
Throw in an altimeter/barometer and transceiver, and you have the ultimate tracking device. Sure sure, now we can all bitch and moan about evil gov't uses of this... but why not more interesting things, such as putting one on each player in a paintball game? You could then uplink all of the data to a UT/Quake3 server, and people could watch the paintball matches over the internet. Make it lazer tag for even more data aquisition...
--Cycon
Course, i would actually expect to see something like this in the head of a missle, for remote steering...
I second that request above. Could you please post a link to the script/mp3 for the rest of us?
--Cycon
Actually, I know the answer to this one. Some of the gamers don't realize that they can only see 60 fps, they just assume that a larger number of frames == better, so they go ga-ga over one-ups-manship.
Of course, the real benefit to having >60 fps on a video card is that during complex scene renders (when you have lots of people on the same screen, or lots of explosions) then the video card is harder-pressed to render all of that detail, and the framerate will drop starkly. The higher your maximum framerate, the higher the framerate will remain when the scene gets complex.
Also, bear in mind that gamers are also looking for higher and higher resolution at that magic 60 fps number. Currently, the highest-end gaming cards can get 1600x1200 @ 60fps ... but once you have many characters on the screen at once, the slowdown is going to be visibly noticable as the framerate drops.
--Cycon
You do realize that this is *Star Wars* you're talking about, right? Take a look at the technology used to create the original Star Wars (the costumes and effect), and take a look at the technology used to advance the story line (the map of the Death Star and C3P0 with wires sticking out everywhere).
The Original Star Wars isn't very impressive compared to contemporary offerings on either side, yet people still enjoy watching the movie. People who will enjoy the next Star Wars (not I -- I wasn't impressed by Episode 1) will still enjoy it in 50 years despite it's campy quality -- afterall, that's what the series is all about -- a campy space opera!
You're also forgetting something else about the advancement of technology. The current limit to visual advancement is the human eye. We can't see faster that 60 fps, we can't distinguish more than 16.77 millions colors, etc. Anyone know what the maximum resolution the human eye can distinguish between might be?
--Cycon
This article says that 3D Studio Max was used for the demonstration which means NT/2000 to me.
If dual-proc Thunderbird motherboards were to arrive on the market a month from now, is the code for linux to take advantage already in place?
Did I just get information when I heard that AMD's SMP is different?
--Cycon
Fair enough, but here's my counter-arguement:
Why should I have to move my mouse all over the screen (as a brand-new user) in to discover symbols which represent functions I've never encountered before?
This still just seems horribly counter-intuitive and user-unfriendly to me. What If I had placed a small stick in the middle of the road, but when you drove close to it, it turned into a brick wall?
--Cycon
Choosing the graphite look just changes the Aqua widgets to monochrome. For example, the three standard window title bar widgets (close window, minimize window and zoom window) are now all the same graphite gray color, rather then being red, yellow and green.
So wait a second here. Doesn't that mean that the three unmarked buttons at the upper-right of every window will now be even more indistinguishable as to their function? It was a bad enough design decision (this is only my opinion) that you can't tell which color performs which function, but now they're going to removed the color distinction as well?
Isn't this basically the equivalent of taking a keyboard and painting a different color over each key's label, and then deciding that wasn't obscure enough and just paiting them all grey?
The next step of course is that each time you click on one of the buttons, their functions are all randomly shuffled about...
--Cycon
A standardized light gun. Yes, I know there's a few out there that one can pick up for a hundred bucks or so, but there aren't any games available for the, because there's not standard for PC Light Guns.
There's nothing I love more at the local arcade than plunking down a dollar or so and double-fisting two light guns while blowing away baddies on the big screen. Now if I could only do that in my apartment the guns would pay for themselves inside of one summer...
--Cycon