I'm probably missing something here, but in the case of Psystar, Apple did not sell any hardware. With hardware, once it's sold, they can't say what to do and what not to do with it. You can smash it to pieces. You can surf the net and send emails with it. You can use it as a doorstop. You can use it to figure out how to increase global warming exponentially just to be a dick. You can take the damn thing apart and use the parts to build a spaceship. They can't be saying don't be doing that with the hardware. Now in the case of this Psystar, I'm not sure if they made a software sale. Now software is licensed and they can put all kinds of things into the license agreement. It's up to you to decide if what they write down in there is fair or not. The way I see it, if I paid for a piece of software, then what the hell difference does it make what I do with it? Who cares if I run it on a Mac, or throw the CD for my dog to catch as a frisbee? In this case, nobody cares. But on the other hand, I understand Apple's problem. They have certain quality standards, and a large part of their brand image and whatnot depends on people having the perception of such quality. Now OS X is based in large part on Mach and BSD, with tons of Apple code thrown in, so chances are that if you're a 1337 h4x0rz, you could get Darwin to run on just about anything from a Cray X/MP to a toaster. But try and install Mac OS X Leopard on a toaster, or a Cray, or any damn thing that Apple hasn't tested and debugged it against, and I betcha you're gonna have problems. Like, maybe it'll work pretty well, but it'll have all kinds of strange effects, kernel panics, and all kinds of other nonsense. It'll be for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple's quality control. For example, the processor, or the chipset, or the type of RAM memory you have, or conflicts with whatever hardware you have that Apple hasn't tested OS X against, or any of a zillion other things, and it'll be a crappy OS experience. It's not Apple's fault. After all, it's not their responsibility to make sure OS X executes properly on anything and everything from a mechanical Turing machine to Deep Thought. But the perception will be that Apple is making something crappy, and that's bad for their image. Because people don't care why it fails. They see that it does and without thinking for even a second, they go, "this is the suxx0rz." Thus, they want you to run the OS on hardware they produce. Yes, they earn another 2 or 3 or 10 thousand bucks when you buy a computer. But believe me, it's not that money they're concerned about so much. It's their brand image and perception of quality. That's worth a billion times more than some measly box with some electronics in it. It's tested against their hardware. There is quality control in the hardware itself. They make damn sure that the software will work as well as it possibly can and you'll never get such an experience from Windoze, Linux, *BSD, or whatever. Because OS X is the only OS that is made for specific computers from a finite set of models. All other OSes are made to run on everything and anything. Because with Apple, the computer is an integrated appliance. It does what it's supposed to do, and it doesn't require you to be a Windows registry h4x0rz or a *NIX sed/awk wizard. You turn it on and it does what it's supposed to. For that, I have a lot of respect for Apple. And if they say, "Don't go running this software on non-Apple hardware," well, if you think you're smarter than they are, go and try to outdo their achievements and let's see you design a computer and operating system that is nearly as good. In ten years, you'll still be working on the bootloader (I love it when an Open Source project says, "blahblah is an operating system that can run on any hardware, supports all protocols, runs programs from any architecture and OS no matter what hardware you have, provides a 3D desktop with unlimited numbers of screens," etc., etc., etc., and then you keep reading and the status is, "We're finally getting the bootloader to work. Next step, let's figure out how to start writing this OS kernel. Our biggest problem right now is getting GCC to compile on our development box. What is this "make" program and how does it fit in with compiling a compiler?":
Right, so here's my incredibly important opinion that you must agree with. Apple implemented this nifty multi-touch thing on the iPhone (and consequently on the iPod Touch). What they need to do now is extend this multi-touch thing to the computers as well. Heck, if I can see some darn thing on the screen and I want to drag it around or whatever, why shouldn't I be able to just reach out and do that? There should still be a keyboard and a rat for now. Mouse pads should also incorporate multi-touch. I think the keys on the keyboard should all have tiny displays embedded in them that can display any character. Thus, when you switch languages, the keyboard mapping will change and the keys themselves will show what character they'll type. Push Ctrl, Alt, Fn, Open-Apple, Shift, or whatever, and the keys will immediately change to reflect the characters that will be typed. Thus, lowercase letters will be displayed until Shift is held down, at which point they'll change to uppercase and the number keys will change to the symbols on those same keys. Hit Caps Lock and the appropriate behavior will take place. No more people getting confused why their password isn't being accepted or pushing all kinds of wrong keys looking for that dang ñ key when you're typing in Spanish or whatever. Simple. So, where were we? Oh yeah. Take these computers to the next level. Multi-touch on all computer displays and mouse pads. Keyboards where individual keys display what they will do. And while we're at it, how about a non-broken X implementation like there used to be in Tiger?!?
This is very cool! Kind of like implementing the Towers of Hanoi in vim or something. I'm going to test it against some puzzles from this here handy dandy Sudoku book. Now if only someone would make a Chess solver out of dpkg. You choose any out of the huge number of possible mate layouts and it will compute the dependencies from the start of the game to that mate layout! Implementing this should be so obvious that only a total fool won't immediately see how to do it, so it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Cool! Thanks for sharing that. Simpler solutions are often better than more complicated ones (though OpenVPN is ridiculously simple when it comes to connecting networks together). I'll give SSH a whirl sometime...
I don't really know. I guess it boils down to personal preference. When I first used OpenVPN, it was so easy to configure and use (on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac) and gave such flexibility that it's the only thing I use now. It works over SSL. You see a tun or tap device that you can apply packet filtering rules to, so essentially it's like having a dedicated interface connecting you to the distant network. It does public-key encryption, certificate and shared key authentication, compression with LZO; you can make the two networks appear as one with a bridged configuration or as two networks connected by a router with a routed configuration. Yes, you get the same overall result (a tunnel) with SSH but OpenVPN is just so damn easy to set up and incredibly flexible. As I said, personal preference, I suppose.
Duh, just install a Star Trek TNG-style holodeck on one half of a large living room at your house and at the house a thousand miles away. Then you could actually see the people and even interact with them, as their real selfs will be projected in 3D into your holodeck and you will be projected into theirs. You could even get into an argument and beat each other up.
If you're not very adventurous: Any computer. Any video conferencing software (such as Skype). VPN software (such as OpenVPN). VNC software (such as RealVNC). The best is if you get a computer where the screen and computer are in the same enclosure. You don't even hook up a keyboard or a rat. If something happens, you lgo on their desktop thru the VPN and VNC and click on Skype again or whatever.
If you are very adventurous. Buy a nice flat screen display. Take the damn thing apart and get rid of all the crap except the screen and whatever signal massaging hardware is hooked up to it. Get a single board x86 computer that has a watchdog chip on it and built-in flash and tons of RAM for your software installation. Attach it and the screen's signal massaging hardware to one side of a rectangular piece of sheet metal the size of the display, and attach the display on the other side of it. Make that sheet metal a bit taller than the display. Get a camera with built-in microphone; take it apart, and attach it above the display. This probably requires drilling a few holes, tapping is optional, and will probably require some nuts, standoffs, etc. Run the wires however you can, preferably the shortest distance possible. Make an enclosure for this out of wood or something. Install Linux, OpenVPN, X, VNC, and your video conferencing software (something like Ekiga, hacked to automatically initiate a connection to you upon startup) into the flash in such a manner that upon power-up or reset, the entire flash partition is copied into RAM that's treated as a partition and booted from there. At all other times, the flash is never touched. Upon the computer crashing, locking up, or being h4x0red/0wn3d/etc., (which might happen once in a while), the watchdog will reboot it, so a fresh, original filesystem image is loaded back into the RAM and rebooted. This can happen in a matter of a minute from reset thru the videoconferencing software coming up again. With OpenVPN, you can always log in and fix something unexpected if that happens. While we're at it, build yourself one of these. And for extra credit, document the whole process with photos and videos and post it online for everyone to respect you in awe for being such a 1337 h4x0rz yourself. Heck, you might even be able to make a business out of selling a bunch of these. Hint: If you want to do that, stock up on a bunch of the same model display, because those change all the time and you can never buy the same exact thing (with same hardware attached) twice. If you attempt to go through one of those flatscreen stocking companies, the same display will cost you double and not come with the added hardware.
I think they've done something very interesting, and I read the article that describes the trace trees. But I'm really curious -- with all the trouble that it takes to do this sort of interpretation, wouldn't it actually be faster and easier to compile the code into native machine code and then execute it? The compiler wouldn't just happily spit out machine code. It would take security into consideration. Most operations would be implemented by calls to well-defined functions implemented in the browser itself. Regarding security, the fact that code is compiled or interpreted really doesn't make that much difference. You can program a bash script to do a lot of damage, or you can write such a program in C. So I think the security issue isn't any different in this context. The compilation would happen the instant the code comes down the pipe, and unless the code is very long and complicated, I think it would be almost instantaneous. On a modern computer, GCC can pump through thousands of lines in a matter of a split second. A JavaScript compiler optimized to compile very quickly for acceptable results (with perhaps a nice optimization applied to inner loops) would do this beautifully. After the single compilation, you wouldn't need to keep track of all kinds of trees and trampolines and whatnot. The code would be executed as a function call from the browser into the produced object code. I think this could truly provide C-like speeds without the memory and algorithm requirements.
For a company of 16 to 18 people (it has been fluctuating in that range in recent months), we have four people whom you could consider some form of IT. This is not the typical definition of IT. We are a factory with lots of computerized equipment. Most of our time is split 50/50 between developing in-house software and programming the equipment for changeovers. The rest of the time (yes, I said 50/50, but that's 50/50 of most of the time; no math problem here) is spent keeping all of the company's computers and office equipment working properly. This involves anything from changing toner cartridges to specifying equipment purchases to reinstalling Windows for the trillionth time. Back to the issue of ratio, that's a whopping 25% of the company if we have 16 employees, and 22% of the company if we have 18 employees. I'd say it's many computer people for a company this small. But then again, computers are taking over so many roles that used to be performed by humans that more humans are needed to program and run the darn things.
Meh. I'm still waiting for multicore quantum computing. Or at least something that can execute code that doesn't exist yet, so i can play Duke Nukem Forever. Actually, what I really want is a processor that can execute code by its spirit, rather than its letter, so buggy code will work correctly anyway.:-)
You have a chip in your body, so they'll chop your arms off.
The chip transmits to a larger device that you carry with you?!??!?! So what good is it? They'll take the larger device away!
This is the Mark of the Beast, from the Book of Revelations. The end of the world is coming, and so is the long-awaited Second Coming! (My girlfriend will be pleased to hear the latter, but not the former.)
Voting machines with electile dysfunction. I can already see the headlines. Hanging Chads. Pregnant Brads. And some dude named Bob who can't get it up.
I think you misread what I wrote. The email appeared as if it was from my friend. Because it sounded fishy, I called him to find out what the hell is going on. He was safe and sound at home, not in jail in Africa and in need of assistance like the email claimed. In other words, yes, I should believe that someone I call on the phone is not in Africa, when his not being in Africa means that he's not asking for money. Would I have sent money if I believed that he was in Africa? Hell no! I would have contacted the authorities.
They should add a nag screen claiming that Firefox requires product activation now. And since this is Internet software, you will have the option of activating Firefox by mail, by fax, or by calling a 1-900 number and waiting on hold for a few hours for the next available customer service associate, who is looking forward to helping you because your call is important to them. For your convenience, there won't be an option to activate through the Internet. Once you activate, you'll receive your software license, HP style, packed in foam, then bubble wrap, then cardboard, then more foam, then packing peanuts, then a larger enclosing box. The software is free. Software activation, however, requires a nominal service charge of $100 plus shipping and handling. Nah, just kidding. People need to upgrade to the newest version, or else they'll start getting viruses when version 2 support ends, and then everyone will be talking about how much Firefox stinks and how you need to use a different browser, like Netscape Navigator 3.0. We don't want that to happen, do we?! Nope.
How is that an argument against? All it argues is that climate change is slow. Do consider, on a related note, that all of this started happening when the industrial age _began_.
As I said, since I lack the data, I consider this issue neither true nor false. I'm askng how we can be sure that these effects began when the industrial age began. After all, we are using data to figure this out. There are records going back some amount of time as to what the weather was, and this can easily be plotted in a graph. The graph will show ups and downs, and perhaps a general trend. However, the data we have goes back only so many years. Prior to that, the data we have comes from studies of ice cores and other such things. What if the methods used to analyze those findings are actually yielding incorrect results? What if the methods and the data are perfectly fine, as you suggest, but a different issue exists: You know that the temperature is different from day to day, and if you take an average, you'll get different temperatures from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade, from century to century, etc. If you plot this out (let's pretend you have daily data throughout all of history), you'll probably get some crazy waveform. And when you study that waveform, you'll probably see a general trend upwards. But what if you could zoom out more and more, and find that as you do, you see general trends downward, too? Even if we have data going back 10,000 years, how long has this planet been around? Millions? What is 10,000 years in comparison to millions? It's only a tiny sample. Also, let's not forget that correlation and causation might be related, but might not be. All I'm saying is that if we have made up our minds that something in particular is happening to the climate, how can we be sure that our conclusions are correct?
Your proposition makes perfect sense. After all, I commonly pay a 10% fee to transfer millions of bucks around. Why, just the other day, I transferred a billion bucks from here to Uranus and back just for the heck of it. The fee for the first transfer was a hundred million bucks. The return transfer cost slightly less at ninety million bucks. Out of the billion, there are eight hundred and ten million bucks left. (That's a lot of antelope to ship around.)
I do NOT think that scam VICTIMS need to be jailed, whether they are greedy or not.
Yes, you'd have to be a total numbskull to believe some of the stories that scammers use. But if you read the next paragraph, you'll see that even someone who isn't "stupid" can be fooled. Ridiculous and obvious scams come with stories that your uncle's long-lost twin (separated at birth) who lived in Zimbabwe and ran a diamond mine just died in a tragic car accident and you were the only beneficiary in his will, please email over your bank account number and routing info, or that Nigeria's silicon tycoon needs to transfer a billion dollars to a company in the United States but due to some extremely complicated circumstances related to a jacked up political climate, they need to park the funds in the bank account of someone who is trustworthy and you came highly recommended, and they'll leave you 1% of the money as a fee for your troubles (that comes out to ten million bucks), please email us your bank account number, routing info, a photocopy of your driver license and passport, etc., etc., etc., well, all I can say is that if you actually believe any of this shit, you need to be educated. Read about the so-called 419 Scam among others. Yes, you'd have to be "greedy" to fall for such a scam. Should you be jailed? No. You're still the victim of a crime.
Some scams sound more realistic than the ones above. For example, I once received an email bearing a friend's email address as the "From:" address and claiming that he had lost his passport and/or wallet while on vacation in Africa, and due to complications with the local authorities, he needed to borrow $1000 to pay some fine and get out of jail (money which he would supposedly pay back upon returning home). I called my friend on the phone and it turned out that he was safe and sound here at home, not in Africa. Someone had jacked his email password or otherwise hacked into his email account. Apparently, everyone in his address book received such an email. This is the type of scam that even discerning people could fall for. You have to be really, really, really careful not to fall for some of this stuff.
"Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background."
Yeah. You can run Vista on a Mac. But why in the world anybody would want to replace an operating system with a screensaver of monkeys throwing chairs, I have no idea...
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac running Vista!
PC: And I'm a PC running Mac OS X.
Mac: Hey, did you hear about Apple shutting down companies that make PCs run Mac OS X?
Speaking of Al Gore (many people mentioned him already), this reminds me of the day he gave a speech about global warming in New York... on the coldest day in that city's recorded history!! Ok, so some will tell you that it's not global warming, it's climate change. I have no proof to either confirm or deny that, so I do not have an opinion. However, let's examine this situation from another vantage point: History indicates that the Earth has had warmer and colder periods (such as the Ice Age) in the past, so it stands to reason that the climate probably has periods of increasing warmth followed by periods of increasing coldness. We have recorded data going back decades or maybe a few centuries at most. Beyond that, we rely on data collected from cores drilled out of ice and whatnot, and we make certain assumptions about how to interpret that data. Let's also take into consideration that although it is possible to fly across an entire continent in a matter of hours (for example, a trip from New York to Los Angeles takes less than six hours in the air), if you try to trek across that same continent by means available to the human race two hundred years ago, you will find that it takes you months; thus, the Earth is a big huge ball. I once worked on a project where the temperature of a giant steel fixture was taken at various points, several feet apart, every hour of the day. Part of this fixture was exposed to sunlight for several hours. We only BEGAN to measure increased temperature AFTER the sun was no longer shining on it, since it took it that long to respond to temperature changes. Applying this to a huge ball like the Earth (which, as I said, is so big that trekking across a continent will take months), any change to the climate will be extremely slow and will only show up after a delay of years or decades. Indeed, I once heard (though I don't remember where) that when the industrial age began and there was incredible pollution (much more than today with all the regulations we have), it took several decades for the climate to respond, and several more decades to respond after changes were introduced. All I'm trying to say is that we should examine the methods used to determine this "climate change" and figure out if all the SUVs and factories are really making as large of a dent as we think they are. I have a feeling that the Earth is so large, and it's part of such an enormous larger system (the solar system) that it is probably heating up more due to effects from the sun and the ever-changing distance between the sun and the Earth than from what we're doing down here. So are we affecting the climate? Or is it something that simply changes and we couldn't possibly control it? If you have any data to back up one viewpoint or the other, please throw it in...
I have a great idea! The government should create a Random Problems List. Each week, they would pick some unlucky person's name by random out of one of the government computer systems and add that person to the Random Problems List. Once placed on this list, it would be impossible to remove oneself. The results of being placed on this list would be that once per year, some government office or computer system which holds records on the individual would corrupt those records with random information. For example, at the tax office, individual's records would be borked, resulting in the collection of fines. At the parking ticket office, records indicating that unpaid parking tickets were issued might be created randomly, resulting in the vehicle being towed away for no reason. At the immigration office, records showing the individual is in the country illegally might be produced, resulting in them being sent across the border when they've never been there before. At the driver license office, the person's license might be deleted or suspended for no reason. The end result is that all individuals on the list would find their lives basically destroyed by government errors which would take thousands of hours to correct (if they're lucky), only to find that new problems pop up the following year.
Plan the event in advance. Send invitations and advertise the upcoming event widely. Why stop at 60 people? Make it 200 people. Sell tickets. Higher entrance fee at door. Hold it at a hotel banquet hall, paid for through the collected fees. Provide snacks. Have the hotel provide a bar. Make clear that all those attending are responsible for their own equipment.
One - The project should not be called Screaming Monkey. It should be called Airborne Chair.
Two - This seems like a complete waste of the Mozilla team's time, in my opinion. I don't want to diss their hard work, but Firefox is an exceptional piece of software, so it would make more sense to concentrate on making it even better/faster/smaller, rather than waste the time fixing monkey code (or rather making an add-on that fixes functionality in monkey code).
Three - In addition to concentrating the technical abilities on improving Firefox rather than the monkey code, Mozilla's marketing people should be concentrating on getting this browser installed on as many computers as possible. I know they already do this, but they need to do even more. All too often, I find computers out there that run IE by default. This can be changed by lobbying computer manufacturers to make Firefox the default out of the box, in addition to continued press coverage, ads placed in major newspapers and other media, etc. Because when the majority of users make the switch, nobody will care how many bugs there are in IE. Hell, Microsoft might even decide that it offers them no return on the cost of developing it, and the next IE will be Firefox modified to look like IE, with an OSS license, of course. That should be the goal, not fixing someone else's problems.
I wouldn't worry about the licensing. Because if it were impossible for anyone besides Intel and AMD to make an x86 part, then please be so kind as to tell me how in the heck there are a bunch of companies out there that provide x86 parts at various levels of compatibility with the Intel original? It's not just Intel and AMD. There are Transmeta, VIA, Cyrix, ST, Fujitsu, just to name a few. Innovasic Semiconductor makes processors to replace ones that Intel has declared obsolete (see this. The fact that even one company besides Intel exists (AMD) proves that it is possible for such a company to exist, either through a licensing agreement or through no agreement if none is required. This indicates that if Nvidia wishes to enter this business, it is possible for them to do so in one way or another. So I wouldn't worry about monkeys blackening the sky with thrown chairs. Instead, I would ask if it sounds reasonable that Nvidia would want to enter this business, and if so, what does this mean for the computer hardware and software communities, and let Nvidia's legal team figure out what legal strings need to be tied up. They do that all day long anyway.
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I'm probably missing something here, but in the case of Psystar, Apple did not sell any hardware. With hardware, once it's sold, they can't say what to do and what not to do with it. You can smash it to pieces. You can surf the net and send emails with it. You can use it as a doorstop. You can use it to figure out how to increase global warming exponentially just to be a dick. You can take the damn thing apart and use the parts to build a spaceship. They can't be saying don't be doing that with the hardware. Now in the case of this Psystar, I'm not sure if they made a software sale. Now software is licensed and they can put all kinds of things into the license agreement. It's up to you to decide if what they write down in there is fair or not. The way I see it, if I paid for a piece of software, then what the hell difference does it make what I do with it? Who cares if I run it on a Mac, or throw the CD for my dog to catch as a frisbee? In this case, nobody cares. But on the other hand, I understand Apple's problem. They have certain quality standards, and a large part of their brand image and whatnot depends on people having the perception of such quality. Now OS X is based in large part on Mach and BSD, with tons of Apple code thrown in, so chances are that if you're a 1337 h4x0rz, you could get Darwin to run on just about anything from a Cray X/MP to a toaster. But try and install Mac OS X Leopard on a toaster, or a Cray, or any damn thing that Apple hasn't tested and debugged it against, and I betcha you're gonna have problems. Like, maybe it'll work pretty well, but it'll have all kinds of strange effects, kernel panics, and all kinds of other nonsense. It'll be for reasons that have nothing to do with Apple's quality control. For example, the processor, or the chipset, or the type of RAM memory you have, or conflicts with whatever hardware you have that Apple hasn't tested OS X against, or any of a zillion other things, and it'll be a crappy OS experience. It's not Apple's fault. After all, it's not their responsibility to make sure OS X executes properly on anything and everything from a mechanical Turing machine to Deep Thought. But the perception will be that Apple is making something crappy, and that's bad for their image. Because people don't care why it fails. They see that it does and without thinking for even a second, they go, "this is the suxx0rz." Thus, they want you to run the OS on hardware they produce. Yes, they earn another 2 or 3 or 10 thousand bucks when you buy a computer. But believe me, it's not that money they're concerned about so much. It's their brand image and perception of quality. That's worth a billion times more than some measly box with some electronics in it. It's tested against their hardware. There is quality control in the hardware itself. They make damn sure that the software will work as well as it possibly can and you'll never get such an experience from Windoze, Linux, *BSD, or whatever. Because OS X is the only OS that is made for specific computers from a finite set of models. All other OSes are made to run on everything and anything. Because with Apple, the computer is an integrated appliance. It does what it's supposed to do, and it doesn't require you to be a Windows registry h4x0rz or a *NIX sed/awk wizard. You turn it on and it does what it's supposed to. For that, I have a lot of respect for Apple. And if they say, "Don't go running this software on non-Apple hardware," well, if you think you're smarter than they are, go and try to outdo their achievements and let's see you design a computer and operating system that is nearly as good. In ten years, you'll still be working on the bootloader (I love it when an Open Source project says, "blahblah is an operating system that can run on any hardware, supports all protocols, runs programs from any architecture and OS no matter what hardware you have, provides a 3D desktop with unlimited numbers of screens," etc., etc., etc., and then you keep reading and the status is, "We're finally getting the bootloader to work. Next step, let's figure out how to start writing this OS kernel. Our biggest problem right now is getting GCC to compile on our development box. What is this "make" program and how does it fit in with compiling a compiler?":
Right, so here's my incredibly important opinion that you must agree with. Apple implemented this nifty multi-touch thing on the iPhone (and consequently on the iPod Touch). What they need to do now is extend this multi-touch thing to the computers as well. Heck, if I can see some darn thing on the screen and I want to drag it around or whatever, why shouldn't I be able to just reach out and do that? There should still be a keyboard and a rat for now. Mouse pads should also incorporate multi-touch. I think the keys on the keyboard should all have tiny displays embedded in them that can display any character. Thus, when you switch languages, the keyboard mapping will change and the keys themselves will show what character they'll type. Push Ctrl, Alt, Fn, Open-Apple, Shift, or whatever, and the keys will immediately change to reflect the characters that will be typed. Thus, lowercase letters will be displayed until Shift is held down, at which point they'll change to uppercase and the number keys will change to the symbols on those same keys. Hit Caps Lock and the appropriate behavior will take place. No more people getting confused why their password isn't being accepted or pushing all kinds of wrong keys looking for that dang ñ key when you're typing in Spanish or whatever. Simple. So, where were we? Oh yeah. Take these computers to the next level. Multi-touch on all computer displays and mouse pads. Keyboards where individual keys display what they will do. And while we're at it, how about a non-broken X implementation like there used to be in Tiger?!?
This is very cool! Kind of like implementing the Towers of Hanoi in vim or something. I'm going to test it against some puzzles from this here handy dandy Sudoku book. Now if only someone would make a Chess solver out of dpkg. You choose any out of the huge number of possible mate layouts and it will compute the dependencies from the start of the game to that mate layout! Implementing this should be so obvious that only a total fool won't immediately see how to do it, so it is left as an exercise for the reader.
I forgot to include step 10: Provide with the above unit a huge sledgehammer labeled "In event of imminent sexual congress, smash telescreen."
Cool! Thanks for sharing that. Simpler solutions are often better than more complicated ones (though OpenVPN is ridiculously simple when it comes to connecting networks together). I'll give SSH a whirl sometime...
I don't really know. I guess it boils down to personal preference. When I first used OpenVPN, it was so easy to configure and use (on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac) and gave such flexibility that it's the only thing I use now. It works over SSL. You see a tun or tap device that you can apply packet filtering rules to, so essentially it's like having a dedicated interface connecting you to the distant network. It does public-key encryption, certificate and shared key authentication, compression with LZO; you can make the two networks appear as one with a bridged configuration or as two networks connected by a router with a routed configuration. Yes, you get the same overall result (a tunnel) with SSH but OpenVPN is just so damn easy to set up and incredibly flexible. As I said, personal preference, I suppose.
Duh, just install a Star Trek TNG-style holodeck on one half of a large living room at your house and at the house a thousand miles away. Then you could actually see the people and even interact with them, as their real selfs will be projected in 3D into your holodeck and you will be projected into theirs. You could even get into an argument and beat each other up.
At your gramp's kitchen, two options:
If you're not very adventurous: Any computer. Any video conferencing software (such as Skype). VPN software (such as OpenVPN). VNC software (such as RealVNC). The best is if you get a computer where the screen and computer are in the same enclosure. You don't even hook up a keyboard or a rat. If something happens, you lgo on their desktop thru the VPN and VNC and click on Skype again or whatever.
If you are very adventurous. Buy a nice flat screen display. Take the damn thing apart and get rid of all the crap except the screen and whatever signal massaging hardware is hooked up to it. Get a single board x86 computer that has a watchdog chip on it and built-in flash and tons of RAM for your software installation. Attach it and the screen's signal massaging hardware to one side of a rectangular piece of sheet metal the size of the display, and attach the display on the other side of it. Make that sheet metal a bit taller than the display. Get a camera with built-in microphone; take it apart, and attach it above the display. This probably requires drilling a few holes, tapping is optional, and will probably require some nuts, standoffs, etc. Run the wires however you can, preferably the shortest distance possible. Make an enclosure for this out of wood or something. Install Linux, OpenVPN, X, VNC, and your video conferencing software (something like Ekiga, hacked to automatically initiate a connection to you upon startup) into the flash in such a manner that upon power-up or reset, the entire flash partition is copied into RAM that's treated as a partition and booted from there. At all other times, the flash is never touched. Upon the computer crashing, locking up, or being h4x0red/0wn3d/etc., (which might happen once in a while), the watchdog will reboot it, so a fresh, original filesystem image is loaded back into the RAM and rebooted. This can happen in a matter of a minute from reset thru the videoconferencing software coming up again. With OpenVPN, you can always log in and fix something unexpected if that happens. While we're at it, build yourself one of these. And for extra credit, document the whole process with photos and videos and post it online for everyone to respect you in awe for being such a 1337 h4x0rz yourself. Heck, you might even be able to make a business out of selling a bunch of these. Hint: If you want to do that, stock up on a bunch of the same model display, because those change all the time and you can never buy the same exact thing (with same hardware attached) twice. If you attempt to go through one of those flatscreen stocking companies, the same display will cost you double and not come with the added hardware.
Not to machine code, d00d.
I think they've done something very interesting, and I read the article that describes the trace trees. But I'm really curious -- with all the trouble that it takes to do this sort of interpretation, wouldn't it actually be faster and easier to compile the code into native machine code and then execute it? The compiler wouldn't just happily spit out machine code. It would take security into consideration. Most operations would be implemented by calls to well-defined functions implemented in the browser itself. Regarding security, the fact that code is compiled or interpreted really doesn't make that much difference. You can program a bash script to do a lot of damage, or you can write such a program in C. So I think the security issue isn't any different in this context. The compilation would happen the instant the code comes down the pipe, and unless the code is very long and complicated, I think it would be almost instantaneous. On a modern computer, GCC can pump through thousands of lines in a matter of a split second. A JavaScript compiler optimized to compile very quickly for acceptable results (with perhaps a nice optimization applied to inner loops) would do this beautifully. After the single compilation, you wouldn't need to keep track of all kinds of trees and trampolines and whatnot. The code would be executed as a function call from the browser into the produced object code. I think this could truly provide C-like speeds without the memory and algorithm requirements.
For a company of 16 to 18 people (it has been fluctuating in that range in recent months), we have four people whom you could consider some form of IT. This is not the typical definition of IT. We are a factory with lots of computerized equipment. Most of our time is split 50/50 between developing in-house software and programming the equipment for changeovers. The rest of the time (yes, I said 50/50, but that's 50/50 of most of the time; no math problem here) is spent keeping all of the company's computers and office equipment working properly. This involves anything from changing toner cartridges to specifying equipment purchases to reinstalling Windows for the trillionth time. Back to the issue of ratio, that's a whopping 25% of the company if we have 16 employees, and 22% of the company if we have 18 employees. I'd say it's many computer people for a company this small. But then again, computers are taking over so many roles that used to be performed by humans that more humans are needed to program and run the darn things.
Meh. I'm still waiting for multicore quantum computing. Or at least something that can execute code that doesn't exist yet, so i can play Duke Nukem Forever. Actually, what I really want is a processor that can execute code by its spirit, rather than its letter, so buggy code will work correctly anyway. :-)
Voting machines with electile dysfunction. I can already see the headlines. Hanging Chads. Pregnant Brads. And some dude named Bob who can't get it up.
I think you misread what I wrote. The email appeared as if it was from my friend. Because it sounded fishy, I called him to find out what the hell is going on. He was safe and sound at home, not in jail in Africa and in need of assistance like the email claimed. In other words, yes, I should believe that someone I call on the phone is not in Africa, when his not being in Africa means that he's not asking for money. Would I have sent money if I believed that he was in Africa? Hell no! I would have contacted the authorities.
They should add a nag screen claiming that Firefox requires product activation now. And since this is Internet software, you will have the option of activating Firefox by mail, by fax, or by calling a 1-900 number and waiting on hold for a few hours for the next available customer service associate, who is looking forward to helping you because your call is important to them. For your convenience, there won't be an option to activate through the Internet. Once you activate, you'll receive your software license, HP style, packed in foam, then bubble wrap, then cardboard, then more foam, then packing peanuts, then a larger enclosing box. The software is free. Software activation, however, requires a nominal service charge of $100 plus shipping and handling. Nah, just kidding. People need to upgrade to the newest version, or else they'll start getting viruses when version 2 support ends, and then everyone will be talking about how much Firefox stinks and how you need to use a different browser, like Netscape Navigator 3.0. We don't want that to happen, do we?! Nope.
As I said, since I lack the data, I consider this issue neither true nor false. I'm askng how we can be sure that these effects began when the industrial age began. After all, we are using data to figure this out. There are records going back some amount of time as to what the weather was, and this can easily be plotted in a graph. The graph will show ups and downs, and perhaps a general trend. However, the data we have goes back only so many years. Prior to that, the data we have comes from studies of ice cores and other such things. What if the methods used to analyze those findings are actually yielding incorrect results? What if the methods and the data are perfectly fine, as you suggest, but a different issue exists: You know that the temperature is different from day to day, and if you take an average, you'll get different temperatures from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade, from century to century, etc. If you plot this out (let's pretend you have daily data throughout all of history), you'll probably get some crazy waveform. And when you study that waveform, you'll probably see a general trend upwards. But what if you could zoom out more and more, and find that as you do, you see general trends downward, too? Even if we have data going back 10,000 years, how long has this planet been around? Millions? What is 10,000 years in comparison to millions? It's only a tiny sample. Also, let's not forget that correlation and causation might be related, but might not be. All I'm saying is that if we have made up our minds that something in particular is happening to the climate, how can we be sure that our conclusions are correct?
Your proposition makes perfect sense. After all, I commonly pay a 10% fee to transfer millions of bucks around. Why, just the other day, I transferred a billion bucks from here to Uranus and back just for the heck of it. The fee for the first transfer was a hundred million bucks. The return transfer cost slightly less at ninety million bucks. Out of the billion, there are eight hundred and ten million bucks left. (That's a lot of antelope to ship around.)
I do NOT think that scam VICTIMS need to be jailed, whether they are greedy or not.
Yes, you'd have to be a total numbskull to believe some of the stories that scammers use. But if you read the next paragraph, you'll see that even someone who isn't "stupid" can be fooled. Ridiculous and obvious scams come with stories that your uncle's long-lost twin (separated at birth) who lived in Zimbabwe and ran a diamond mine just died in a tragic car accident and you were the only beneficiary in his will, please email over your bank account number and routing info, or that Nigeria's silicon tycoon needs to transfer a billion dollars to a company in the United States but due to some extremely complicated circumstances related to a jacked up political climate, they need to park the funds in the bank account of someone who is trustworthy and you came highly recommended, and they'll leave you 1% of the money as a fee for your troubles (that comes out to ten million bucks), please email us your bank account number, routing info, a photocopy of your driver license and passport, etc., etc., etc., well, all I can say is that if you actually believe any of this shit, you need to be educated. Read about the so-called 419 Scam among others. Yes, you'd have to be "greedy" to fall for such a scam. Should you be jailed? No. You're still the victim of a crime.
Some scams sound more realistic than the ones above. For example, I once received an email bearing a friend's email address as the "From:" address and claiming that he had lost his passport and/or wallet while on vacation in Africa, and due to complications with the local authorities, he needed to borrow $1000 to pay some fine and get out of jail (money which he would supposedly pay back upon returning home). I called my friend on the phone and it turned out that he was safe and sound here at home, not in Africa. Someone had jacked his email password or otherwise hacked into his email account. Apparently, everyone in his address book received such an email. This is the type of scam that even discerning people could fall for. You have to be really, really, really careful not to fall for some of this stuff.
Yeah. You can run Vista on a Mac. But why in the world anybody would want to replace an operating system with a screensaver of monkeys throwing chairs, I have no idea...
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac running Vista!
PC: And I'm a PC running Mac OS X.
Mac: Hey, did you hear about Apple shutting down companies that make PCs run Mac OS X?
Speaking of Al Gore (many people mentioned him already), this reminds me of the day he gave a speech about global warming in New York... on the coldest day in that city's recorded history!! Ok, so some will tell you that it's not global warming, it's climate change. I have no proof to either confirm or deny that, so I do not have an opinion. However, let's examine this situation from another vantage point: History indicates that the Earth has had warmer and colder periods (such as the Ice Age) in the past, so it stands to reason that the climate probably has periods of increasing warmth followed by periods of increasing coldness. We have recorded data going back decades or maybe a few centuries at most. Beyond that, we rely on data collected from cores drilled out of ice and whatnot, and we make certain assumptions about how to interpret that data. Let's also take into consideration that although it is possible to fly across an entire continent in a matter of hours (for example, a trip from New York to Los Angeles takes less than six hours in the air), if you try to trek across that same continent by means available to the human race two hundred years ago, you will find that it takes you months; thus, the Earth is a big huge ball. I once worked on a project where the temperature of a giant steel fixture was taken at various points, several feet apart, every hour of the day. Part of this fixture was exposed to sunlight for several hours. We only BEGAN to measure increased temperature AFTER the sun was no longer shining on it, since it took it that long to respond to temperature changes. Applying this to a huge ball like the Earth (which, as I said, is so big that trekking across a continent will take months), any change to the climate will be extremely slow and will only show up after a delay of years or decades. Indeed, I once heard (though I don't remember where) that when the industrial age began and there was incredible pollution (much more than today with all the regulations we have), it took several decades for the climate to respond, and several more decades to respond after changes were introduced. All I'm trying to say is that we should examine the methods used to determine this "climate change" and figure out if all the SUVs and factories are really making as large of a dent as we think they are. I have a feeling that the Earth is so large, and it's part of such an enormous larger system (the solar system) that it is probably heating up more due to effects from the sun and the ever-changing distance between the sun and the Earth than from what we're doing down here. So are we affecting the climate? Or is it something that simply changes and we couldn't possibly control it? If you have any data to back up one viewpoint or the other, please throw it in...
I have a great idea! The government should create a Random Problems List. Each week, they would pick some unlucky person's name by random out of one of the government computer systems and add that person to the Random Problems List. Once placed on this list, it would be impossible to remove oneself. The results of being placed on this list would be that once per year, some government office or computer system which holds records on the individual would corrupt those records with random information. For example, at the tax office, individual's records would be borked, resulting in the collection of fines. At the parking ticket office, records indicating that unpaid parking tickets were issued might be created randomly, resulting in the vehicle being towed away for no reason. At the immigration office, records showing the individual is in the country illegally might be produced, resulting in them being sent across the border when they've never been there before. At the driver license office, the person's license might be deleted or suspended for no reason. The end result is that all individuals on the list would find their lives basically destroyed by government errors which would take thousands of hours to correct (if they're lucky), only to find that new problems pop up the following year.
Plan the event in advance. Send invitations and advertise the upcoming event widely. Why stop at 60 people? Make it 200 people. Sell tickets. Higher entrance fee at door. Hold it at a hotel banquet hall, paid for through the collected fees. Provide snacks. Have the hotel provide a bar. Make clear that all those attending are responsible for their own equipment.
One - The project should not be called Screaming Monkey. It should be called Airborne Chair.
Two - This seems like a complete waste of the Mozilla team's time, in my opinion. I don't want to diss their hard work, but Firefox is an exceptional piece of software, so it would make more sense to concentrate on making it even better/faster/smaller, rather than waste the time fixing monkey code (or rather making an add-on that fixes functionality in monkey code).
Three - In addition to concentrating the technical abilities on improving Firefox rather than the monkey code, Mozilla's marketing people should be concentrating on getting this browser installed on as many computers as possible. I know they already do this, but they need to do even more. All too often, I find computers out there that run IE by default. This can be changed by lobbying computer manufacturers to make Firefox the default out of the box, in addition to continued press coverage, ads placed in major newspapers and other media, etc. Because when the majority of users make the switch, nobody will care how many bugs there are in IE. Hell, Microsoft might even decide that it offers them no return on the cost of developing it, and the next IE will be Firefox modified to look like IE, with an OSS license, of course. That should be the goal, not fixing someone else's problems.
I wouldn't worry about the licensing. Because if it were impossible for anyone besides Intel and AMD to make an x86 part, then please be so kind as to tell me how in the heck there are a bunch of companies out there that provide x86 parts at various levels of compatibility with the Intel original? It's not just Intel and AMD. There are Transmeta, VIA, Cyrix, ST, Fujitsu, just to name a few. Innovasic Semiconductor makes processors to replace ones that Intel has declared obsolete (see this. The fact that even one company besides Intel exists (AMD) proves that it is possible for such a company to exist, either through a licensing agreement or through no agreement if none is required. This indicates that if Nvidia wishes to enter this business, it is possible for them to do so in one way or another. So I wouldn't worry about monkeys blackening the sky with thrown chairs. Instead, I would ask if it sounds reasonable that Nvidia would want to enter this business, and if so, what does this mean for the computer hardware and software communities, and let Nvidia's legal team figure out what legal strings need to be tied up. They do that all day long anyway.