Well, up to a point. I'm seriously considering an iPhone in order to have to carry just one device. It's a decent phone with a working voicemail interface. It's a UNIX box and wifi hub in my pocket. It's an IMAP client. So it's a mediocre camera; _any_ camera is mediocre at some point. With a 3rd party app to cover shopping lists and some kind of nice simple to-do list it'll be a fine PDA for me. It can be used as a bearable terminal when I really need one and have nothing (versus my palm, which it too painful to type on and too narrow).
When I want to use it as a UNIX box I can ssh to it, using a real keyboard and monitor on a desktop.
What do I wish it had? Support for a bluetooth keyboard; I do _not_ want it to have a physical keyboard but it would be nice to wirelessly attach one. GPS would be nice. 3G would be nice (if my local telcos didn't charge such stupid rates for data traffic); we don't have EDGE here - it's GSM (no IP traffic) or 3G.
I always wondered why they chose POP over IMAP in the first place.
I'm only guessing, but think about the server resource usage. Everything they offer at present (web, pop) involves a client connecting, sucking briefly, and letting go. IMAP connections tend to be much longer lived, and that's a serious allocation issue with millions of users.
By not allowed to do racial profiling and suspicion picking because you might offend someone, by treat everybody equal money are wasted.
But by insisting on no random searches, you establish a profile (however accurate or inaccurate). And if there's a profile, it can be inferred from who gets searched, and if it can be inferred then terrorists can, with some patience and lead time, choose bombers now known to be outside the profile. And they can just walk onto the plane. Hurrah!
It is not enough to insert a little random salt, either. If there is a small random search versus a large profiled search, the odds are still very profitable for the bombers to groom someone outside the profile. So you're still making it efficient for the terrorists.
Yeah, but it's no preserved end-to-end - it's local link only. The MAC isn't in the IP packet, it's in the ethernet wrapper. So the OP is right, technically - it's not in an IP packet.
if (foo == bah \ || zip == zap \ || frob == frib):
Trivial and contrived, but I frequently fold complex expressions and make related parts line up for readability. With proportional fonts, that breaks and will always break.
Proportional fonts are great for prose, but suck for code. They are a red herring in the Column Wars.
[ The picky amongst you will point out that the above does not align nicely
anyway; that is because of slashdot's formatting code - I have just spent a
couple of minutes experimenting with <pre> (not supported),
<ecode> and (eaten) with little joy.
On a proper fixed with display it would look really good. trust me. ]
Firstly, for people who trip over 80 columns no other number will be
enough either; particular things will always be "just too wide".
Since you will need to fold or rearrange at some point anyway, a wider
terminal won't solve all your problems.
Second, 80 columns is enough to get a decent amount of text on a
display, and also code if your indent step isn't insanely wide. And it's
narrow enough to read a line at a glance instead of having to scan
along it. That seems a core tradeoff to me, that 80 columns does well.
Having a widely accepted standard width provides various benefits: everyone's
already aware of it and many people use it, and thus people can plan for it.
Example: my standard environment has 4 80-column terminals side-by-side on a
1600 pixel display. If some loon moves to a gratuitously wider format I'll
forever be mangling his code when it displays.
The "finding that number insufficient for coding" argument doesn't wash with
me; it generally means you're writing stuff too cumbersome for someone else to
easily read. You can always break lines or subdivide code chunks. When I,
personally, don't take that trouble it's usually laziness, not because I'm
doing something inherently complex.
For "more verbose writing", I'm assuming you mean prose. If so, you should be
using a format that lets people reflow the text (eg HTML or the format=flowed
plain text syntax for MIME messages); then you can work in whatever you like
and I can reflow the paragraphs on my nice 80 column display. That way we're
both happy. I'm doing that right here, in HTML.
You write "Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are
capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized
terminal?" No, it isn't. More pixels lets me get several terminal side by
side, (man page, shell, code, output windows etc). A wider "standard terminal"
will only make that harder.
I do use wider terminals for some things, but they're mostly output windows
with wide line-formatted logging. No window will ever be wide enough to fit
them all, and when I use a wide terminal it only helps these pathological
things, and does not solve the whole problem. So i don't consider it an
argument for a wider "standard width".
He may refer to a landline, but I'm not. I don't have one. I would be very interested in a mobile phone that implemented whitelists. I'd also be interested in a phone company that mentioned the caller-id (or lack) in the "you have voicemail" SMS message it sends me:-(
While I'd like a phone that was pretty flexible about whitelists (eg times) I'd be happy with switchable profiles like the common "silent" etc choices one has. I fear that certain things are done too far upstream - it would be nice if the phone could decide to answer/voicemail/reject/forward a call, but I think the phone company stores a braindead profile for you, producing an architecture hardwired bustedness. Hmm, surely modern phones can run a voicemail system internally these days?
Of course, I don't want a beefy and expensive modern phone - I've been using a Nokia 6100 for quite a while because it's Just A Phone and small and light. No cameras, video etc. Being a geek what I really want is a tiny real computer (eg like a Soekris but lighter) with a phone and display/keyboard as separate Bluetooth peripherals of some kind.
Now, they're saying it could be a thousand years or less between impacts. When was the last major impact? We could be due for a serious catastrophe in very short order, practically instantaneous in geological terms.
It doesn't matter when the last impact was. The greater frequency does imply the risk of such an impact soon is correspondingly higher, but unless there is some clockwork mechanism directing impactors at us regularly, the time since the last impact has NO bearing on the likely time to another. Consider: you have, flukily, flipped a coin 10 times and come up heads. Presuming the coin to be fair and random, what is the likelihood of head on the next flip? It's 1/2. It is not more likely or unlikely based on the recent history - the events are unconnected.
It seems smaller and lighter than their other phones. It has no camera. It fits in my jeans pocket conveniently. But you have to order them; of course no "phone store" displays or carries one.
You write:
Simple. They don't just fit on bookshelves, they fit on bookshelves well.
Bah! DVD cases are the size they are because that's the size VHS tapes are; it's a consumer acceptance thing,
not ergonimic design!
If your bookshelves fit VHS tapes well, they fit DVDs well.
You'll notice that neither is the same size as a standard paperback book,
the archetypal storage unit for a bookshelf.
<rant>... and don't get me started on book sizes and publisher behaviour...
I'm still putting off buying Harry Bloody Potter^W^W^WHalf Blood Prince
because it's not out in standard small paperback form, long long after release...</rant>
Generally, we give most engineers local root on their machine if we trust them;
it lets them do certain adminish tasks to their local machine.
However, we encourage them to use it very very rarely;
those unsuited to this privileges generally lose it.
Most user data is NFS supplied and not root-enabled.
This causes almost no problems.
Can you describe in detail what your users need (or expect, generally a larger list).
Root power is surprisingly rarely needed if your setup is good.
Without details, your issues can't be addressed properly. You will
memerely receive a lot of recipes for breaking^Wweakening^Wloosening
your security to achieve the power you request, without considering
other ways to address the underlying problems causing the request.
Catholics believe that abortion is wrong, yet it is somehow evil for us to try to use political means to end the wrong.
Is it at least ok to push for the appointment of judges who are against murder or do we have to "open-minded" there, as well?
I belive the rational objection is to you trying to put up judges who will take sides based on their
religious beliefs in a country that is supposed to have separation of Church and State.
Being a devoutly religious should automatically disqualify you for state office
in such a country because if you're devout, you are morally incapable of performing state duties uninfluenced by your church.
It doesn't mean you're wrong, just disqualified.
Regarding the vi/emacs key mappings, I'm a rabid vi user for real editing.
However, I use the emacs key bindings for command line and web form editing
because in a single line setting the modelessness is a win. Since I only use
^a, ^b, ^f, ^e, ^d, ^p, ^n in this context it's not a great burden.
You'll notice recent GTK updates (and therefore Mozilla/Firefox) tossed the Emacs
key bindings. Adding this to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
Didn't the DMCA or something introduce a protection for databases / collections?
I forget the exactly legislation, but I'm pretty sure it postdates 1991
and I'm sure it's to let people play dog in the manger for exactly
this kind of thing.
I block ads because they annoy the F- out of me. Most of them are flashy animated shite.
Quiet static _text_ ads like Google do not annoy me at all.
There are other reasons to despise them, but they are all secondary:
they slow page loading (and in firefox/mozilla, that slows form-autofill too),
they bugger the page width (often the banners are embedded in some table that encloses the article;
this means that you _can't_ shrink the page to narrower than the banner - if you do you will need to scroll
sideways to read the text),
they spawn popups, and so on.
You do have this option. It's called a motorcycle. Admittedly, the guvmint forces a wheel quota on you (thou shalt have only two) but you at least
get to choose your protection level.
Yes, I use a motorcycle every day.
Cheaper. Faster. More fun.
My desktop just has a small borderless terminal window at the top running "tail -f" on ~/var/log/alert.
I write notifications there with ANSI yellow escape sequences so they're
bright.
Important email (== personal email and, at work, new-bug email) generates
one line messages there via procmail recipes. Opening my email also clears the window (write the terminal-clear sequence to the alert log).
Any decent calendar system should be capable of generating email for reminders,
so when my workplace gets a (decent) calendar system the reminders will appear
the same way.
I have a few other tiny tiny scripts that use this too; a "run job then alert"
script that pops a line onto the log, and so forth.
This is very simple, extensible, doesn't litter my desktop with popups.
Works for me!
I'd have to say that you're over-thinking this. I doubt you need digital signatures at all.
First, should there be any questions at all, well--Use The Source, Luke! You've got it, so examine it and compile it yourself.
I'd have to say you're underthinking this.
Nobody has the time to source review every app and update of that app.
Many lack the skills, and almosy everyone lacks sufficient attention span
to ready and perfectly comprehend all the source code.
A great deal of stuff is done on trust, and digital signatures at least
tell the user that they are in fact placing their trust in who they think they're
placing their trust.
If the keys for signature are improperly managed
then that confidence (that the people you trust are the authors)
may not be maintained.
So if you're signing stuff, this is an important issue.
Signing stuff lets users adopt a higher level
trust method than "read the source".
Overkill example: how recently have you read the entire Linux source code
and verified it for correctness?
(You must read it all, including the drivers, because everything runs with full privileges,
and so a hack may be inserted in any code sequence that can run.)
Even small libraries are infeasible to personally verify
if you're not intimate with the code.
Therefore users must trust the authors for most things,
and signatures are essential to being able to do so.
The whole "loud pipes save lives" moto lore is probably false.
And of course, you can't hear bicycles either; there's no "interesting safety issue" here folks.
Leaving aside the expense and complexity of installing and administering these
trackers and preventing abuses like extending their use to infer speeding or to
report on where people go, this is silly.
The Cal govt needs a certain amount of tax income.
If fuel efficient cars are lowering the tax they feel should be proportional
to road use then they should raise the fuel tax (it's like, 50% in Oz).
This has three big benefits:
it restores their revenues
it's very very simple
it's further discouragement of fuel inefficient vehicles,
which I had thought a high goal in Cal, home of the tightest of emissions laws
Re:Wait a sec, this story isn't about "dark matter
on
Dark Matter Discovered
·
· Score: 1
It is about dark matter!
"dark matter" is just matter that's not yet oberved. Could be baryonic or not;
we don't know because it's not yet observed! (Well, perhaps until now.)
That's all the "dark" in the term means.
Try not to be misled by that extremely stupid "dark matter" X-Files episode where they make out it's necessarily a weird "other" form of matter
with tacky blue-lightning special effects:-)
Slashdot Mirror
When I want to use it as a UNIX box I can ssh to it, using a real keyboard and monitor on a desktop.
What do I wish it had? Support for a bluetooth keyboard; I do _not_ want it to have a physical keyboard but it would be nice to wirelessly attach one. GPS would be nice. 3G would be nice (if my local telcos didn't charge such stupid rates for data traffic); we don't have EDGE here - it's GSM (no IP traffic) or 3G.
It is not enough to insert a little random salt, either. If there is a small random search versus a large profiled search, the odds are still very profitable for the bombers to groom someone outside the profile. So you're still making it efficient for the terrorists.
Yeah, but it's no preserved end-to-end - it's local link only. The MAC isn't in the IP packet, it's in the ethernet wrapper. So the OP is right, technically - it's not in an IP packet.
[ The picky amongst you will point out that the above does not align nicely anyway; that is because of slashdot's formatting code - I have just spent a couple of minutes experimenting with <pre> (not supported), <ecode> and (eaten) with little joy. On a proper fixed with display it would look really good. trust me. ]
Second, 80 columns is enough to get a decent amount of text on a display, and also code if your indent step isn't insanely wide. And it's narrow enough to read a line at a glance instead of having to scan along it. That seems a core tradeoff to me, that 80 columns does well.
Having a widely accepted standard width provides various benefits: everyone's already aware of it and many people use it, and thus people can plan for it. Example: my standard environment has 4 80-column terminals side-by-side on a 1600 pixel display. If some loon moves to a gratuitously wider format I'll forever be mangling his code when it displays.
The "finding that number insufficient for coding" argument doesn't wash with me; it generally means you're writing stuff too cumbersome for someone else to easily read. You can always break lines or subdivide code chunks. When I, personally, don't take that trouble it's usually laziness, not because I'm doing something inherently complex.
For "more verbose writing", I'm assuming you mean prose. If so, you should be using a format that lets people reflow the text (eg HTML or the format=flowed plain text syntax for MIME messages); then you can work in whatever you like and I can reflow the paragraphs on my nice 80 column display. That way we're both happy. I'm doing that right here, in HTML.
You write "Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal?" No, it isn't. More pixels lets me get several terminal side by side, (man page, shell, code, output windows etc). A wider "standard terminal" will only make that harder.
I do use wider terminals for some things, but they're mostly output windows with wide line-formatted logging. No window will ever be wide enough to fit them all, and when I use a wide terminal it only helps these pathological things, and does not solve the whole problem. So i don't consider it an argument for a wider "standard width".
While I'd like a phone that was pretty flexible about whitelists (eg times) I'd be happy with switchable profiles like the common "silent" etc choices one has. I fear that certain things are done too far upstream - it would be nice if the phone could decide to answer/voicemail/reject/forward a call, but I think the phone company stores a braindead profile for you, producing an architecture hardwired bustedness. Hmm, surely modern phones can run a voicemail system internally these days?
Of course, I don't want a beefy and expensive modern phone - I've been using a Nokia 6100 for quite a while because it's Just A Phone and small and light. No cameras, video etc. Being a geek what I really want is a tiny real computer (eg like a Soekris but lighter) with a phone and display/keyboard as separate Bluetooth peripherals of some kind.
It seems smaller and lighter than their other phones. It has no camera. It fits in my jeans pocket conveniently. But you have to order them; of course no "phone store" displays or carries one.
Bah! DVD cases are the size they are because that's the size VHS tapes are; it's a consumer acceptance thing, not ergonimic design! If your bookshelves fit VHS tapes well, they fit DVDs well. You'll notice that neither is the same size as a standard paperback book, the archetypal storage unit for a bookshelf.
<rant>... and don't get me started on book sizes and publisher behaviour... I'm still putting off buying Harry Bloody Potter^W^W^WHalf Blood Prince because it's not out in standard small paperback form, long long after release...</rant>
Most user data is NFS supplied and not root-enabled. This causes almost no problems.
Can you describe in detail what your users need (or expect, generally a larger list).
Root power is surprisingly rarely needed if your setup is good. Without details, your issues can't be addressed properly. You will memerely receive a lot of recipes for breaking^Wweakening^Wloosening your security to achieve the power you request, without considering other ways to address the underlying problems causing the request.
Being a devoutly religious should automatically disqualify you for state office in such a country because if you're devout, you are morally incapable of performing state duties uninfluenced by your church. It doesn't mean you're wrong, just disqualified.
You'll notice recent GTK updates (and therefore Mozilla/Firefox) tossed the Emacs key bindings. Adding this to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
restores sanity.A clever strategy to prevent piracy. Nobody would want to copy this disc!
Do you really mean "ominous"? "Onerous" I would understand, but maybe there are forebodings of imminent doom in the GUI...
Didn't the DMCA or something introduce a protection for databases / collections? I forget the exactly legislation, but I'm pretty sure it postdates 1991 and I'm sure it's to let people play dog in the manger for exactly this kind of thing.
There are other reasons to despise them, but they are all secondary: they slow page loading (and in firefox/mozilla, that slows form-autofill too), they bugger the page width (often the banners are embedded in some table that encloses the article; this means that you _can't_ shrink the page to narrower than the banner - if you do you will need to scroll sideways to read the text), they spawn popups, and so on.
You do have this option. It's called a motorcycle. Admittedly, the guvmint forces a wheel quota on you (thou shalt have only two) but you at least get to choose your protection level.
Yes, I use a motorcycle every day. Cheaper. Faster. More fun.
Important email (== personal email and, at work, new-bug email) generates one line messages there via procmail recipes. Opening my email also clears the window (write the terminal-clear sequence to the alert log).
Any decent calendar system should be capable of generating email for reminders, so when my workplace gets a (decent) calendar system the reminders will appear the same way.
I have a few other tiny tiny scripts that use this too; a "run job then alert" script that pops a line onto the log, and so forth.
This is very simple, extensible, doesn't litter my desktop with popups. Works for me!
Coincidentally, I just fetched a bootable CDROM for updating a BIOS for an IBM x-series machine. So not everyone is still in floppy land.
I'd have to say you're underthinking this. Nobody has the time to source review every app and update of that app. Many lack the skills, and almosy everyone lacks sufficient attention span to ready and perfectly comprehend all the source code.
A great deal of stuff is done on trust, and digital signatures at least tell the user that they are in fact placing their trust in who they think they're placing their trust. If the keys for signature are improperly managed then that confidence (that the people you trust are the authors) may not be maintained.
So if you're signing stuff, this is an important issue. Signing stuff lets users adopt a higher level trust method than "read the source". Overkill example: how recently have you read the entire Linux source code and verified it for correctness? (You must read it all, including the drivers, because everything runs with full privileges, and so a hack may be inserted in any code sequence that can run.)
Even small libraries are infeasible to personally verify if you're not intimate with the code. Therefore users must trust the authors for most things, and signatures are essential to being able to do so.
The whole "loud pipes save lives" moto lore is probably false. And of course, you can't hear bicycles either; there's no "interesting safety issue" here folks.
The Cal govt needs a certain amount of tax income. If fuel efficient cars are lowering the tax they feel should be proportional to road use then they should raise the fuel tax (it's like, 50% in Oz). This has three big benefits:
"dark matter" is just matter that's not yet oberved. Could be baryonic or not; we don't know because it's not yet observed! (Well, perhaps until now.) That's all the "dark" in the term means.
Try not to be misled by that extremely stupid "dark matter" X-Files episode where they make out it's necessarily a weird "other" form of matter with tacky blue-lightning special effects:-)