"Speech is nice, but it is very much a niche application."
True, but there is one niche where I think it would fit quite well: CLI replacement.
I am not talking about shell scripting, where you would have all the same problems as with programmation, but about simple commands.
What do you think is easier to remember, an obscure find command or "find me all files created during the week of the twelve, having the word report in their name and bigger than fifty kilobytes."
Of course, STT won't be enough for that, you would also need a semantic analysis and geeks still will use a CLI for speed reason but it still would be useful.
That's because due to increased competition from Linux MS will be forced to integrate X Window into Windows in the future. Hence, you can do anything from any access point on the ship in the least secure way possible.
Oh, I forgot: 1.5. Profit (it's much more likely to folow step one than step 2).
Personally, my karma plan is like that:
1. Make ubercool and uberuseful software. 2. Use many fake accounts/mailboxes to pressure rob & Co to interview me. 3. When people ask further questions respond to them in the thread and get moderated up. 4. Profit.
I am still at stage 0.5 (get off my ass and start coding).
I suppose that you are talking about the remote root backdoor when they drop the shields of Kahn's ship. If Kahn had upgraded the ship's computers to Linux (or HURD, version 1 just might be ready by then;)) they would have had the opportunity to check for any such back door.
Given how easy it is to take total control of the ship (at least in the following series, I haven't seen most of TOS) from any terminal I would say that it's pretty safe to say that they are using an MS derived system.
" like people walking in while I'm, uhh, ya know."
Masturbating?
For this kind of use you may want more security like that provided by a combination of bedroom_door and blanket. This combination both prevent accidental security breach (when bedroom_door is secured) and allows you to secure your assets when security is breached by providing a camouflaging apparatus (blanket or similar) while you securely hide your data.
"pico == 1e-12 [wikipedia.org]. So if your average GUI takes 1 GB, this one should take 1/1000 byte."
That's because you are approaching the problem from the wrong angle.
The picoGUI takes at most (so I am told) about half a megabyte.
This means that it has the equivalent functionality of an average GUI taking 1/2*1e12 or 5e11 megabytes. That is the picoGUI packs up in half a megabyte the functionality of a GUI of approximatively 500 petabyte!!!
Certainly such a GUI must put to shame the Star Trek LCARS and AUI (Acoustic user interface, when they alk to the computer directly), let alone such puny GUIs as what Windows Blackcomb isn't yet and MacOS X.
"Anyone who can speak English as a second language flawlessly must be smart enough to have something worth saying."
Define "flawlessly". Using that word implies a canonical form of English, which doesn't exist as oft pointed on/. (no central organism deciding what is English and what isn't).
I have a good enough grasp of English to consider myself quasi-fluent (I think in English when speaking it but I sometimes have to think about what expression I should use to express my thoughts) and I understand more vocabulary than the average English bloke (although I use a subset of this vocabulary to express myself) and I also speak faster than most Englishmen I know but I wouldn't call my English flawless, far from it.
IMHO, English doesn't need to be complicated to "recognize stupid foreigners", our accent takes care of that (the moment I say one word somebody says "Oh! You're French.").
"How did this get +5 Funny? Well, I must welcome the 5 Frenchmen who've had the dishonour of learning English to Slashdot."
Hey, just recently there was a thread saying that Frenchmen didn't have any sense of humour about themselves; apparently Americans don't either.
BTW, I'm a Frenchman knowing enough english to be in a position to regularly correct English people's english* and I really like english so don't flame me as an english hater because I'm not one.
*which doesn't mean tha my english is perfect, just generally better than the average Englishman (except for some colloquial expressions when I encounter them for the first time).
"Your grandmother was an idiot, then, as the bulk of the English language is derived from other languages (such as German and French) and is based on Latin (one of the most beautiful languages ever.)"
Which is why it is vomiting. Have you ever eaten a delicious salted dish and another delicious sugar dessert at the same time? How good was it?
Why don't the big distributions encrypt their MD5 sums (maybe they do and I don't know it)?
If you use two servers for data and sum you double the work of the crackers but if you use encryption you make their work exponentially hard because they need to find your private key to fake the encrypted MD5 sum.
While some people may think that the GPG public key can also be changed to one by the attacker the difference is that the MD5 sum change with each release, makinbg it impossible to know if the new one is genuine whereas the key doesn't, so you just need to get the good key once, not each time.
Well, congratulations for making the necessary effort. I hope many more developers will in the future.
"It also doesn't help that the French have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves."
Maybe you will say that I am an exception but I am French and I certainly have a sense of humor about French people in general and me in particular. More than once I have given rope to my (non-French) friends to joke about me, even needing to complete it because they didn't see it ("Oh! I thought you would say...").
"Neither do the Germans, but the Germans at least have the excuse that they don't have a sense of humor about anything."
Not true, otherwise how could "the funniest joke in the world" have worked on their troops?
More seriously, my German teacher al ways said that in French you laugh just after the middle of the joke whereas in German you laugh at the end because the positionment of the words in the sentence are such that the meaning of the joke comes only with the last word, the verb, so you can't get it before.
"And by the way, it's "piece de resistance". Use some common sense. (pizza? what the hell were you thinking?)"
He, if you want to be pedantic about French, make sure that one (me) isn't going to read your post.
It's "plat de resistance" (although there may be a spelling mistake on top of missing accent(s)). Plat is the French word for a dish, it means main course/dish.
Oh, and by the way "eccentric Frenchman" seems redundant to me;)
"actually, if they really are out to get you, then you aren't paranoid, you're realistic."
Generally quite wrong. Most (all?) paranoids believe that many people/groups (if not everybody) are out to get them. Just because you are right in a few cases because they are out to get you doesn't mean you are realistic (unless everybody that you think is out to get you IS out to get you), it just is statistically bound to be (the more people you think are out to get you, the more likely it is that at least one of them is).
Anyway, this sig is just a paraphrase of the Enemy of The State tag line:
"[I] belive K (or was it R??) was involded in it [Plan 9] as well".
You must be thinking about Ken Thompson.
IIRC, Kernighan and Ritchie are the one that created C, while Thompson and Ritchie are the one that created Unix (Unix first, then C, then Unix rewritten in C; again IIRC).
" If these prices "shill" her, then you're probably not going to be able to swing a new Mac."
She has enough to at least buy an old iMac+floppy; I just am concerned that in a year she mayh need more and may regret not buying a better machine today.
"A built-in CDRW/DVDROM drive will cost you a few hundred bucks more."
Unfortunately the prices in Italy (where she is) are more expensive:
US IT CDROM 999 1318 COMBO 1299 1798
Quite a difference, huh. That must be the VAT.
I can help her buy the CDROM one but I won't have enough dough to help her buy the combo.
"I'd suggest finding some way to get the $1000 iBook, but rather than springing for the combo drive, just buy one of those tiny USB keychain drives"
I will ask her to see if the computers she is likely to interact with these days have USB (or more likely, I will ask her how old they are) and let her choose between floppy and USB keychain. 128Mb is an insane size for any document.
"I would figure out her price range and go to a mac retailer with her."
I would do that if I wasn't in the UK and her in Italy.
"but it will sound like your saying mac hardware sucks to your sister."
She isn't hell bent on performance or anything, which is why about any modern Mac should be enough for her current needs.
My fear is that given that she never owned a computer, the fact of using one regularly will make her needs expand beyond the machine I would recomment if I knew her needs to be fixed, which is why I want to avoid recommending the old style iMacs.
"Understand what you'll be using it for and do your homework BEFORE spending the $$$ to get a G4"
Speaking of homework, maybe you (or other Apple users in/.) can help me convice somebody to switch.
My sister, who doesn't know squat about computer other than how to use MS Office and browse the Web asked me to advise her to buy a computer (not a new one, her first one). I personnally refuse to recommend the Wintel platform anymore (the OS is getting good but the company is getting worse) and while I love Linux I wouldn't recommend it to her just yet (maybe in a few more years), which leaves us with the Macs.
Unfortunately, I never owned or even used a Mac myself, which makes it more difficult for me to advise her wisely although I start to have a good idea of what would provide for her current needs (mostly word processing and the like) and not stuck her up when he needs grow... Oh, and she is also needs a wayh to put her documents on some removable media (she is used to floppy but I really think CDRW would be better for when her needs grows along with the size of her files) that can also be read by a Windows PC.
At first she wanted a laptop but given the price (she is far from rich) she decided to settle on a desktop.
My first consideration was the iBook plus USB fdd but the price quickly shilled her.
Second was the classic iMac plus USB fdd, old but decent hardware (after all, my old desktop PC was a AMD K6 2 50Mhz and was quite good) and not that expensive either. But I was struggling between my knowledge that it was good enough for her and my knowledge that it was good enough for her NOW but that it was a computer at the end of its lifecycle and I don't want to get her a computer that she will feel the need to change in one or two years. I am also concerned about its performance running MacOS X, after reading the very interesting articles relating to it on Ars Technica (the one by John Siracusa).
So my third opinion was that the eMac is quite a good computer, with a bigger screen (17'' instead of 15''), better processor (G4-700 instead of G3-600), a GeForce2 with 32Mb of vram (useful for Jaguar) AND a CDRW, which would make the need of an additional floppy drive useless and bring her data transfer and storage habits into the late nineties*.
That was what I was going to advise her tommorrow, maybe with a bit of financial help from me if necessary (I'm not rich either but it would probably be better spent that way).
However, with the price drop on the new low end iBook under the price of the low end eMac, even when adding a floppy drive, it seems very attractive: a configuration that fully fills her current needs (thanks to Appleworks present on all these machines and the fact that it is a laptop as she originally wanted) and it seems powerful enough (on paper) to run MacOS X Jaguar at least in a useable manner, if not better. And if her needs grow such that she needs a CDRW she can always buy a USB one (or better, a firewire one) after recovering from the initial expense.
So, if anybody knowing more about Macs than me can spot any big mistakes that would invalidate that analysis, could you point them to me please (I really don't want to advise her to buy the wrong computer because of my ignorance).
Alternatively, any links to Mac sites in English, French or Italian or to a more suitable forum for these questions (but not in Italian, I can decipher some of it, but I wouldn't call that reading) would be useful (I already got a few over the last few days and Google directory is also useful but if you use a Mac you probably have a few interesting links).
Remember, it is for a good cause, to convert somebody to Macintoshs (and me too, in one or two years, when I get enough money for it).
Thanks
PS: Argh, this is as long as I feared it would be. As a bonus for whoever sticked for that long I found this funny page over at lowendmac.com: Top 10 ways not to get hired: http://www.lowendmac.com/scope/02/1106.html
*No, not the new decade, that will be DVD-R or DVD+R IMHO and definitely not into the new century or millenium, we have plenty of time to develop many generations of data storage technologies during the next 96 years, let alone 996 years.
Slashdot Mirror
"Previously I've answered that by telling them that I didn't want a state-imposed religion, but many christians don't see a problem with that."
Ask them if they don't have a problem if the state imposed religion is islam, paganism or any other religion that they don't believe in.
"Linux price to performance ratio: Error: Divide by zero. Continue?(Y/N)"
should be performance to price ratio, unless you mean linux performance=0 so price/performance=n/0.
"Speech is nice, but it is very much a niche application."
True, but there is one niche where I think it would fit quite well: CLI replacement.
I am not talking about shell scripting, where you would have all the same problems as with programmation, but about simple commands.
What do you think is easier to remember, an obscure find command or "find me all files created during the week of the twelve, having the word report in their name and bigger than fifty kilobytes."
Of course, STT won't be enough for that, you would also need a semantic analysis and geeks still will use a CLI for speed reason but it still would be useful.
"Yeah, and a cellphone is just like two cans and some string, only slightly more useful."
And without the string, of course.
That's because due to increased competition from Linux MS will be forced to integrate X Window into
Windows in the future. Hence, you can do anything from any access point on the ship in the least secure way possible.
"No, wait, finger up the ass?, that wasn't me, I swear, I didn't say that!"
Admit it, you are the goat.cx guy and all you are waiting for is to have a hammer terminated tentacle up your ass.
Yeah, yeah!
1. Become famous
2. Get karma on
Oh, I forgot:
1.5. Profit (it's much more likely to folow step one than step 2).
Personally, my karma plan is like that:
1. Make ubercool and uberuseful software.
2. Use many fake accounts/mailboxes to pressure rob & Co to interview me.
3. When people ask further questions respond to them in the thread and get moderated up.
4. Profit.
I am still at stage 0.5 (get off my ass and start coding).
I suppose that you are talking about the remote root backdoor when they drop the shields of Kahn's ship. If Kahn had upgraded the ship's computers to Linux (or HURD, version 1 just might be ready by then
Given how easy it is to take total control of the ship (at least in the following series, I haven't seen most of TOS) from any terminal I would say that it's pretty safe to say that they are using an MS derived system.
" like people walking in while I'm, uhh, ya know."
Masturbating?
For this kind of use you may want more security like that provided by a combination of bedroom_door and blanket. This combination both prevent accidental security breach (when bedroom_door is secured) and allows you to secure your assets when security is breached by providing a camouflaging apparatus (blanket or similar) while you securely hide your data.
"pico == 1e-12 [wikipedia.org]. So if your average GUI takes 1 GB, this one should take 1/1000 byte."
That's because you are approaching the problem from the wrong angle.
The picoGUI takes at most (so I am told) about half a megabyte.
This means that it has the equivalent functionality of an average GUI taking 1/2*1e12 or 5e11 megabytes. That is the picoGUI packs up in half a megabyte the functionality of a GUI of approximatively 500 petabyte!!!
Certainly such a GUI must put to shame the Star Trek LCARS and AUI (Acoustic user interface, when they alk to the computer directly), let alone such puny GUIs as what Windows Blackcomb isn't yet and MacOS X.
"It was originally sent out to capture the marquis."
;)
The Maquis, not the Marquis. Chakotay is not some kind of French nobleman.
"Anyone who can speak English as a second language flawlessly must be smart enough to have something worth saying."
/. (no central organism deciding what is English and what isn't).
Define "flawlessly". Using that word implies a canonical form of English, which doesn't exist as oft pointed on
I have a good enough grasp of English to consider myself quasi-fluent (I think in English when speaking it but I sometimes have to think about what expression I should use to express my thoughts) and I understand more vocabulary than the average English bloke (although I use a subset of this vocabulary to express myself) and I also speak faster than most Englishmen I know but I wouldn't call my English flawless, far from it.
IMHO, English doesn't need to be complicated to "recognize stupid foreigners", our accent takes care of that (the moment I say one word somebody says "Oh! You're French.").
"How did this get +5 Funny? Well, I must welcome the 5 Frenchmen who've had the dishonour of learning English to Slashdot."
Hey, just recently there was a thread saying that Frenchmen didn't have any sense of humour about themselves; apparently Americans don't either.
BTW, I'm a Frenchman knowing enough english to be in a position to regularly correct English people's english* and I really like english so don't flame me as an english hater because I'm not one.
*which doesn't mean tha my english is perfect, just generally better than the average Englishman (except for some colloquial expressions when I encounter them for the first time).
"Your grandmother was an idiot, then, as the bulk of the English language is derived from other languages (such as German and French) and is based on Latin (one of the most beautiful languages ever.)"
Which is why it is vomiting. Have you ever eaten a delicious salted dish and another delicious sugar dessert at the same time? How good was it?
That was also my thought when I read it.
Why don't the big distributions encrypt their MD5 sums (maybe they do and I don't know it)?
If you use two servers for data and sum you double the work of the crackers but if you use encryption you make their work exponentially hard because they need to find your private key to fake the encrypted MD5 sum.
While some people may think that the GPG public key can also be changed to one by the attacker the difference is that the MD5 sum change with each release, makinbg it impossible to know if the new one is genuine whereas the key doesn't, so you just need to get the good key once, not each time.
Well, congratulations for making the necessary effort. I hope many more developers will in the future.
"This is false. You can rent out any movie that you own( whether of what Hollywood thinks about it."
Sure you can, its illegal in most/all countries but you can do it.
"It also doesn't help that the French have absolutely no sense of humor about themselves."
...").
Maybe you will say that I am an exception but I am French and I certainly have a sense of humor about French people in general and me in particular. More than once I have given rope to my (non-French) friends to joke about me, even needing to complete it because they didn't see it ("Oh! I thought you would say
"Neither do the Germans, but the Germans at least have the excuse that they don't have a sense of humor about anything."
Not true, otherwise how could "the funniest joke in the world" have worked on their troops?
More seriously, my German teacher al ways said that in French you laugh just after the middle of the joke whereas in German you laugh at the end because the positionment of the words in the sentence are such that the meaning of the joke comes only with the last word, the verb, so you can't get it before.
"And by the way, it's "piece de resistance". Use some common sense. (pizza? what the hell were you thinking?)"
;)
He, if you want to be pedantic about French, make sure that one (me) isn't going to read your post.
It's "plat de resistance" (although there may be a spelling mistake on top of missing accent(s)). Plat is the French word for a dish, it means main course/dish.
Oh, and by the way "eccentric Frenchman" seems redundant to me
"actually, if they really are out to get you, then you aren't paranoid, you're realistic."
Generally quite wrong. Most (all?) paranoids believe that many people/groups (if not everybody) are out to get them. Just because you are right in a few cases because they are out to get you doesn't mean you are realistic (unless everybody that you think is out to get you IS out to get you), it just is statistically bound to be (the more people you think are out to get you, the more likely it is that at least one of them is).
Anyway, this sig is just a paraphrase of the Enemy of The State tag line:
"It's Not Paranoia If They're Really After You."
"[I] belive K (or was it R??) was involded in it [Plan 9] as well".
You must be thinking about Ken Thompson.
IIRC, Kernighan and Ritchie are the one that created C, while Thompson and Ritchie are the one that created Unix (Unix first, then C, then Unix rewritten in C; again IIRC).
"These simple rules give remarkably realistic looking results and are a good example of emergent behaviour which is the hallmark of A-Life."
Maybe geeks should do the same and then we could say that we have A-Life.
" If these prices "shill" her, then you're probably not going to be able to swing a new Mac."
She has enough to at least buy an old iMac+floppy; I just am concerned that in a year she mayh need more and may regret not buying a better machine today.
"A built-in CDRW/DVDROM drive will cost you a few hundred bucks more."
Unfortunately the prices in Italy (where she is) are more expensive:
US IT
CDROM 999 1318
COMBO 1299 1798
Quite a difference, huh. That must be the VAT.
I can help her buy the CDROM one but I won't have enough dough to help her buy the combo.
"I'd suggest finding some way to get the $1000 iBook, but rather than springing for the combo drive, just buy one of those tiny USB keychain drives"
I will ask her to see if the computers she is likely to interact with these days have USB (or more likely, I will ask her how old they are) and let her choose between floppy and USB keychain. 128Mb is an insane size for any document.
The iBook definitely looks like the way to go.
Thanks to all those that bothered answering.
"comp.sys.mac.*"
Thanks, I will (at least) lurk there.
"I would figure out her price range and go to a mac retailer with her."
I would do that if I wasn't in the UK and her in Italy.
"but it will sound like your saying mac hardware sucks to your sister."
She isn't hell bent on performance or anything, which is why about any modern Mac should be enough for her current needs.
My fear is that given that she never owned a computer, the fact of using one regularly will make her needs expand beyond the machine I would recomment if I knew her needs to be fixed, which is why I want to avoid recommending the old style iMacs.
"Understand what you'll be using it for and do your homework BEFORE spending the $$$ to get a G4"
/.) can help me convice somebody to switch.
Speaking of homework, maybe you (or other Apple users in
My sister, who doesn't know squat about computer other than how to use MS Office and browse the Web asked me to advise her to buy a computer (not a new one, her first one). I personnally refuse to recommend the Wintel platform anymore (the OS is getting good but the company is getting worse) and while I love Linux I wouldn't recommend it to her just yet (maybe in a few more years), which leaves us with the Macs.
Unfortunately, I never owned or even used a Mac myself, which makes it more difficult for me to advise her wisely although I start to have a good idea of what would provide for her current needs (mostly word processing and the like) and not stuck her up when he needs grow... Oh, and she is also needs a wayh to put her documents on some removable media (she is used to floppy but I really think CDRW would be better for when her needs grows along with the size of her files) that can also be read by a Windows PC.
At first she wanted a laptop but given the price (she is far from rich) she decided to settle on a desktop.
My first consideration was the iBook plus USB fdd but the price quickly shilled her.
Second was the classic iMac plus USB fdd, old but decent hardware (after all, my old desktop PC was a AMD K6 2 50Mhz and was quite good) and not that expensive either. But I was struggling between my knowledge that it was good enough for her and my knowledge that it was good enough for her NOW but that it was a computer at the end of its lifecycle and I don't want to get her a computer that she will feel the need to change in one or two years. I am also concerned about its performance running MacOS X, after reading the very interesting articles relating to it on Ars Technica (the one by John Siracusa).
So my third opinion was that the eMac is quite a good computer, with a bigger screen (17'' instead of 15''), better processor (G4-700 instead of G3-600), a GeForce2 with 32Mb of vram (useful for Jaguar) AND a CDRW, which would make the need of an additional floppy drive useless and bring her data transfer and storage habits into the late nineties*.
That was what I was going to advise her tommorrow, maybe with a bit of financial help from me if necessary (I'm not rich either but it would probably be better spent that way).
However, with the price drop on the new low end iBook under the price of the low end eMac, even when adding a floppy drive, it seems very attractive: a configuration that fully fills her current needs (thanks to Appleworks present on all these machines and the fact that it is a laptop as she originally wanted) and it seems powerful enough (on paper) to run MacOS X Jaguar at least in a useable manner, if not better. And if her needs grow such that she needs a CDRW she can always buy a USB one (or better, a firewire one) after recovering from the initial expense.
So, if anybody knowing more about Macs than me can spot any big mistakes that would invalidate that analysis, could you point them to me please (I really don't want to advise her to buy the wrong computer because of my ignorance).
Alternatively, any links to Mac sites in English, French or Italian or to a more suitable forum for these questions (but not in Italian, I can decipher some of it, but I wouldn't call that reading) would be useful (I already got a few over the last few days and Google directory is also useful but if you use a Mac you probably have a few interesting links).
Remember, it is for a good cause, to convert somebody to Macintoshs (and me too, in one or two years, when I get enough money for it).
Thanks
PS: Argh, this is as long as I feared it would be. As a bonus for whoever sticked for that long I found this funny page over at lowendmac.com:
Top 10 ways not to get hired: http://www.lowendmac.com/scope/02/1106.html
*No, not the new decade, that will be DVD-R or DVD+R IMHO and definitely not into the new century or millenium, we have plenty of time to develop many generations of data storage technologies during the next 96 years, let alone 996 years.