Actually, the FBI can't tell the difference between a criminal and a suspected criminal. In the U.S., it takes a jury (or a guilty plea) to do that.
I was watching some show that had a car chase filmed from a helicopter. Guy had a semi and was wreaking havoc, driving through roadblocks, ramming police cars, going so far as to use his truck to push other cars out of the way when he hit some stopped traffic on the freeway. Finally he's off the road, surrounded by police cars, gets out of his truck, starts fighting, the police eventually get him into the back of a cruiser, the whole thing has been filmed, and the reporter comes on the mic and says "the police are now taking the SUSPECT into custody"... it always floors me when I see something like this and hear the word "suspect." I know, I know: legal terminology, due process, reporter CYAing so he doesn't get sued for slander or libel (I always forget--whichever one doesn't need to be printed) but still, it just makes me laugh out loud every time.
I can almost hear the words of denial from the Mac Fanboys already. I can't hear the exact words, but I can sense the general whine.
I never said OS X was immune, but this is a) not spread by drive-by downloads, b) doesn't self-replicate, and c) is the first major outbreak for Mac OS X of any flavor (server or desktop) in eight years. By definition, any OS can have trojans; no OS other than Windows has had so many different (and successfully exploited) attack vectors. Just because two OSs are both not perfect does NOT mean they're equally bad.
A small part of me wants OSX to become a majority OS, just so I can see Mac fanboys eat their own words!
Yeah, just like how, from ~1996 to ~2000 or so, Apache had so many more vulnerabilities than IIS, because it was* the more popular webserver. Oh, wait...
* It remains more popular, or at least pretty close, depending on how you like to measure, but IIS had so many exploits in the old days, despite having MUCH smaller share than Apache.
It was obviously a setup. (And a very good one at that.) No way would they send the theater the entire print and say "but only show 10 minutes of it!" It was planned all along. If they would have advertised "World premier of new movie!" they would have had a million people show up. Advertising "Special screening of a 27-year-old movie!" guarantees that only true fans would appear, which was exactly the audience they wanted for this event.
As for the print, it didn't actually catch fire. What happens is if the projector jams, the film stops moving past the lamp, which is very hot, and the bit of film that's directly in front of the bulb melts from the heat. Makes for a very neat effect on screen. I read the description of what happened and I could prep a print to do that in about 20 minutes. (Used to be a projectionist.) Or maybe they went so far as to make a special print and the burning was just an effect. I think they did that in Gindhouse. They've certainly got the resources to do that (wouldn't take much) even for a one-time event.
This fight will expand to be a USA vs. the world thing.
Cool. Maybe in 5 years those involved will make a videogame out of it. You can be a Sony exec with a briefcase full of rootkits, a Google exec with a "Don't Be Evil" shield, a YouTube coder who can disappear in the San Bruno fog and respawn safely at Tanforan...
I like Craigslist as much as anyone, but #$%&#$ I wish they'd database-ize their listings. They could make it optional when placing an ad, but if people WANTED to use dropdowns for specific things, they could, and they'd probably sell more because people could search better and find them more. I'd LOVE to be able to search for four-door cars with manual transmissions, or G5 PowerMacs with 1 GB RAM or more, or tablet PCs with screen > 11 inches, or rooms for rent for less than $750 a month, etc.
Also, let me search across regions. I know the point of Craigslist is to sell in person, but plenty of people are willing to ship, and there's lots of stuff I want to buy, but isn't often on eBay, and I'm not in a big enough city that a lot of people are selling, say, old SGI or Sun gear, but if you look in SF or any other real city you'll find plenty.
How about employing someone to proof-read your posts and check the links?
Hey, don't be so hard on them. Taco made it almost two whole words into this story without a typo. ("This weeks code refresh..." should be "This week's code refresh...")
It's always funny when the power goes out in my building. The network gear is on UPSs and all the laptop users just keep working. The rest of us sit by the windows and take a break.
SGI had lots of problems. They were the height of coolness but they didn't take advantage of what they had when they had it. I think Apple learned a lot more from them than just how to transition CPUs. (They had done that once before, as it happens.) But speaking of Apple, a few days after SGI was delisted (the first time, back in 2005), I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive. The article has this quote from SGI founder Jim Clark:
Clark is not afraid to publicly dis a company like Apple, much as Steve Jobs once mocked IBM.
"Apple," Jim Clark will sigh, as if he were talking about a horse on its way to the glue factory. "They're not doing anything... Apple blew it."
Then, with a dismissive wave of his hand, and just the hint of a grin: "I think they're in serious trouble."
"Microsoft's new Windows ad... has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again."
It has? I thought intelligent people figured this out years ago. If you compare comparably-specced machines, Macs are usually in the neighborhood. If you want a stripped-down machine, which Apple doesn't offer, then the next closest Mac is usually higher. If you want a form factor that Apple doesn't make (tablet, netbook, etc.) you're SOL. Did I miss anything?
Yeah. The fixed-width right column starts to overlap the left below about 950px wide on http://slashdot.org/~YourUserName/comments, but it doesn't overlap on http://slashdot.org/~YourUserName . On that page, the left column shrinks until the whole page is about 800px wide, then it forces you to scroll. Glorious.
Dear Slashdot, Please create a read-only user on your database server and open:3306 to the world. We'll take it from there. Thanks, The Internets
Speaking of code and the iPhone, it's be nice if there were a good version of Slashdot for the iPhone and iPod touch (and Palm Pre, and Blackberry Storm, and Android), like every single other major site out there. (Even Wikipedia works well on iPhone now!) The ancient page for Palm doesn't quite cut it anymore. I've started on my own PHP script to pull the page and reformat it for iPhone but that only works for the main page (and a little bit for the story pages)--it'd be nice if the entire site were in a wrapper like that. That's the whole point of CSS--to be able to do things like that EASILY. I did my workaround in a couple afternoons--it wouldn't take long at all to write a simple wrapper for the whole site. Just remove all the chrome and add a 'viewport' setting and you're 90% done.
The silver lining here: since a) this is available now and b) the price is so high, if Apple introduces a new model this summer and I decide to upgrade, I know I'll be able to sell my (activated but no longer needed) 3G handset for more than I paid for it.:-)
I used to love doing a demo to people who thought I was out of my gourd when I said that Windows multitasked better than Mac OS. This worked up until 8.6, IIRC. Definitely at least 8.1. Click on a large file. Press command-D to duplicate it. Watch the progress meter creep along. Now CLICK ON THE DESKTOP. Don't even switch to another app--the Finder is still the foreground app, but the 'copy' box itself isn't in the foreground. Now, watch the progress meter run 67% slower! Yes, a copy that might have taken 10 seconds will take 30 unless the 'copy' indicator is the absolute most foregroundest thing happening. Then do the same in Win95. Start a copy, switch apps, LAUNCH apps, play Solitaire... whatever. The copy dialog wouldn't slow unless you started doing something else disk-intensive.
Not saying that Windows was perfect or that Mac OS had nothing good to offer, but SO many Mac users thought that Macs were just God's gift to computing and that WIndows was absolute shit, and that just wasn't the case. From when Win95 came out to until OS X came out (10.2, really) there were a lot of things about Windows that were better than what Mac had. Especially since there was quite a difference in hardware costs (typically 2x-3x more for a Mac) and it was only worse for that year that the G4 was stalled at 500 MHz. So Apple started making dual-CPU boxes--but the OS, and most apps, didn't gain anything from the second CPU.
Then OS X got better and better and better, and Windows got worse and worse and worse*, and now I'm not exaggerating when I say I only use Windows for testing and demos. The end.
* Wireless networking on early XP: "Found a network... Signal strength: EXCELLENT!... Lost connection... Found a network... Signal strength: EXCELLENT!... " Repeat ad infiditum until you give up and find a long Ethernet cable.
Old story: a guy made a mistake that cost his employer $10 million. The boss called him into the office. The guy said "I assume you're going to fire me?" The boss answered "Why would I? I just spent ten million training you!"
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards...
In 12 months--hell, I'll give them 24, so they've got a year for implementations after the standard is set--I imagine the success of this will be somewhere between that of VRML and SVG.
O M F G... did you catch the "unboxing" bit? A plain fucking brown cardboard box?!?!? (At the 30-second mark.) Dude--if it's a plain-ass cardboard box, don't show it in the ad! My only guess is that this was done by some guys who got some advance knowlege of impending layoffs at Dell that snuck into their boss' office and saw their pink slips in his drawer.
Yeah, I'm sure this is really keeping Steve Jobs up nights. Maybe this was Mike's plan--to have Steve die in a laughing fit. Steve's probably conference-calling Phil Schiller and Tim Cook right now, saying "You know, I'm gonna retire early. You guys will be fine without me."
OK, just finished the video... so it's two pounds heavier than the Air and still no optical drive?!?!? The ports can't weight that much. What the fuck is it made from, lead?
Funny. I always thought the problem with Flash on the iPhone was that 99% of existing Flash content would be totally unusable. A typical Flash game might be 640x480 but the iPhone's screen is half that, so scale it down 50% electronically. Plus the screen is 160dpi versus ~100dpi for a typical desktop screen, so cut it down by another third physically. Then, once you've done all that... how do you control it?!? With a virtual keyboard that covers another 50% of the content? And as good as the touchscreen is, and as good as the keyboard is for typing (with autocorrect/spellcheck), all the Flash games I've seen have required fast and accurate keyboarding and/or mousing. I think if you were to put your laptop on the floor and try to play a Flash game by using your big toe on the keyboard and the trackpad, that's what an existing Flash game on the iPhone would be like.
And besides games, what else is Flash used for? Content? The iPhone can barely handle HTML frames, how in the hell is it going to deal with some gonad's custom text box (with nonstandard scrollbars) that doesn't even respond to scroll wheel input on a standard Desktop? And what about the fact that, with a touchscreen, there is no mouse, so you don't have your regular mousein/mousedown/mouseup/mouseout states for all the fancy house-over-and-I'll-show-you-more-options crap that everyone seems to love doing?
And of course all your other points are 100% correct too. I loved the Palm Pre CES video--"you can just run as many apps as you want!" Uh-huh. The first time I get my hands on a Pre, the first thing I'm going to do is open a few apps and a bunch of web pages to see if it a) freezes or b) crashes. I figure it's pretty much gotta be one or the other.
They mentioned streaming video a couple times. Anyone know if they're talking about streaming static files, or if we can finally stream LIVE video from standard servers like, oh, I don't know, maybe QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the FBI can't tell the difference between a criminal and a suspected criminal. In the U.S., it takes a jury (or a guilty plea) to do that.
I was watching some show that had a car chase filmed from a helicopter. Guy had a semi and was wreaking havoc, driving through roadblocks, ramming police cars, going so far as to use his truck to push other cars out of the way when he hit some stopped traffic on the freeway. Finally he's off the road, surrounded by police cars, gets out of his truck, starts fighting, the police eventually get him into the back of a cruiser, the whole thing has been filmed, and the reporter comes on the mic and says "the police are now taking the SUSPECT into custody"... it always floors me when I see something like this and hear the word "suspect." I know, I know: legal terminology, due process, reporter CYAing so he doesn't get sued for slander or libel (I always forget--whichever one doesn't need to be printed) but still, it just makes me laugh out loud every time.
And one hell of a rapper.
Sweden has Pirates, Australia has Jedi... and I'm stuck in stupid boring America. :-(
I can almost hear the words of denial from the Mac Fanboys already. I can't hear the exact words, but I can sense the general whine.
I never said OS X was immune, but this is a) not spread by drive-by downloads, b) doesn't self-replicate, and c) is the first major outbreak for Mac OS X of any flavor (server or desktop) in eight years. By definition, any OS can have trojans; no OS other than Windows has had so many different (and successfully exploited) attack vectors. Just because two OSs are both not perfect does NOT mean they're equally bad.
A small part of me wants OSX to become a majority OS, just so I can see Mac fanboys eat their own words!
Yeah, just like how, from ~1996 to ~2000 or so, Apache had so many more vulnerabilities than IIS, because it was* the more popular webserver. Oh, wait...
* It remains more popular, or at least pretty close, depending on how you like to measure, but IIS had so many exploits in the old days, despite having MUCH smaller share than Apache.
It was obviously a setup. (And a very good one at that.) No way would they send the theater the entire print and say "but only show 10 minutes of it!" It was planned all along. If they would have advertised "World premier of new movie!" they would have had a million people show up. Advertising "Special screening of a 27-year-old movie!" guarantees that only true fans would appear, which was exactly the audience they wanted for this event.
As for the print, it didn't actually catch fire. What happens is if the projector jams, the film stops moving past the lamp, which is very hot, and the bit of film that's directly in front of the bulb melts from the heat. Makes for a very neat effect on screen. I read the description of what happened and I could prep a print to do that in about 20 minutes. (Used to be a projectionist.) Or maybe they went so far as to make a special print and the burning was just an effect. I think they did that in Gindhouse. They've certainly got the resources to do that (wouldn't take much) even for a one-time event.
This fight will expand to be a USA vs. the world thing.
Cool. Maybe in 5 years those involved will make a videogame out of it. You can be a Sony exec with a briefcase full of rootkits, a Google exec with a "Don't Be Evil" shield, a YouTube coder who can disappear in the San Bruno fog and respawn safely at Tanforan...
I like Craigslist as much as anyone, but #$%&#$ I wish they'd database-ize their listings. They could make it optional when placing an ad, but if people WANTED to use dropdowns for specific things, they could, and they'd probably sell more because people could search better and find them more. I'd LOVE to be able to search for four-door cars with manual transmissions, or G5 PowerMacs with 1 GB RAM or more, or tablet PCs with screen > 11 inches, or rooms for rent for less than $750 a month, etc.
Also, let me search across regions. I know the point of Craigslist is to sell in person, but plenty of people are willing to ship, and there's lots of stuff I want to buy, but isn't often on eBay, and I'm not in a big enough city that a lot of people are selling, say, old SGI or Sun gear, but if you look in SF or any other real city you'll find plenty.
How about employing someone to proof-read your posts and check the links?
Hey, don't be so hard on them. Taco made it almost two whole words into this story without a typo. ("This weeks code refresh..." should be "This week's code refresh...")
It'll remain in Beta until they add the oft-requestd ability to 'sort'. Maybe in the next half-decade...
Yeah. It's only been a problem for a few decades. (See bug #2.) Maybe someday, someone, somewhere will take notice and do something about it.
It's always funny when the power goes out in my building. The network gear is on UPSs and all the laptop users just keep working. The rest of us sit by the windows and take a break.
Funny how things can change.
"Microsoft's new Windows ad... has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again."
It has? I thought intelligent people figured this out years ago. If you compare comparably-specced machines, Macs are usually in the neighborhood. If you want a stripped-down machine, which Apple doesn't offer, then the next closest Mac is usually higher. If you want a form factor that Apple doesn't make (tablet, netbook, etc.) you're SOL. Did I miss anything?
Yeah. The fixed-width right column starts to overlap the left below about 950px wide on http://slashdot.org/~YourUserName/comments, but it doesn't overlap on http://slashdot.org/~YourUserName . On that page, the left column shrinks until the whole page is about 800px wide, then it forces you to scroll. Glorious.
Dear Slashdot, :3306 to the world. We'll take it from there.
Please create a read-only user on your database server and open
Thanks,
The Internets
And if you're on an iPhone, it sucks even worse. The CSS is totally borked--the right column is a fixed width and overlaps your comment scores so you can't see them at all. But thank God for cruft! You can still go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?nick=YourNameHere and see the old version.
Speaking of code and the iPhone, it's be nice if there were a good version of Slashdot for the iPhone and iPod touch (and Palm Pre, and Blackberry Storm, and Android), like every single other major site out there. (Even Wikipedia works well on iPhone now!) The ancient page for Palm doesn't quite cut it anymore. I've started on my own PHP script to pull the page and reformat it for iPhone but that only works for the main page (and a little bit for the story pages)--it'd be nice if the entire site were in a wrapper like that. That's the whole point of CSS--to be able to do things like that EASILY. I did my workaround in a couple afternoons--it wouldn't take long at all to write a simple wrapper for the whole site. Just remove all the chrome and add a 'viewport' setting and you're 90% done.
The silver lining here: since a) this is available now and b) the price is so high, if Apple introduces a new model this summer and I decide to upgrade, I know I'll be able to sell my (activated but no longer needed) 3G handset for more than I paid for it. :-)
I used to love doing a demo to people who thought I was out of my gourd when I said that Windows multitasked better than Mac OS. This worked up until 8.6, IIRC. Definitely at least 8.1. Click on a large file. Press command-D to duplicate it. Watch the progress meter creep along. Now CLICK ON THE DESKTOP. Don't even switch to another app--the Finder is still the foreground app, but the 'copy' box itself isn't in the foreground. Now, watch the progress meter run 67% slower! Yes, a copy that might have taken 10 seconds will take 30 unless the 'copy' indicator is the absolute most foregroundest thing happening. Then do the same in Win95. Start a copy, switch apps, LAUNCH apps, play Solitaire... whatever. The copy dialog wouldn't slow unless you started doing something else disk-intensive.
Not saying that Windows was perfect or that Mac OS had nothing good to offer, but SO many Mac users thought that Macs were just God's gift to computing and that WIndows was absolute shit, and that just wasn't the case. From when Win95 came out to until OS X came out (10.2, really) there were a lot of things about Windows that were better than what Mac had. Especially since there was quite a difference in hardware costs (typically 2x-3x more for a Mac) and it was only worse for that year that the G4 was stalled at 500 MHz. So Apple started making dual-CPU boxes--but the OS, and most apps, didn't gain anything from the second CPU.
Then OS X got better and better and better, and Windows got worse and worse and worse*, and now I'm not exaggerating when I say I only use Windows for testing and demos. The end.
* Wireless networking on early XP: "Found a network ... Signal strength: EXCELLENT! ... Lost connection ... Found a network ... Signal strength: EXCELLENT! ... " Repeat ad infiditum until you give up and find a long Ethernet cable.
Old story: a guy made a mistake that cost his employer $10 million. The boss called him into the office. The guy said "I assume you're going to fire me?" The boss answered "Why would I? I just spent ten million training you!"
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards...
In 12 months--hell, I'll give them 24, so they've got a year for implementations after the standard is set--I imagine the success of this will be somewhere between that of VRML and SVG.
O M F G... did you catch the "unboxing" bit? A plain fucking brown cardboard box?!?!? (At the 30-second mark.) Dude--if it's a plain-ass cardboard box, don't show it in the ad! My only guess is that this was done by some guys who got some advance knowlege of impending layoffs at Dell that snuck into their boss' office and saw their pink slips in his drawer.
Yeah, I'm sure this is really keeping Steve Jobs up nights. Maybe this was Mike's plan--to have Steve die in a laughing fit. Steve's probably conference-calling Phil Schiller and Tim Cook right now, saying "You know, I'm gonna retire early. You guys will be fine without me."
OK, just finished the video... so it's two pounds heavier than the Air and still no optical drive?!?!? The ports can't weight that much. What the fuck is it made from, lead?
Funny. I always thought the problem with Flash on the iPhone was that 99% of existing Flash content would be totally unusable. A typical Flash game might be 640x480 but the iPhone's screen is half that, so scale it down 50% electronically. Plus the screen is 160dpi versus ~100dpi for a typical desktop screen, so cut it down by another third physically. Then, once you've done all that... how do you control it?!? With a virtual keyboard that covers another 50% of the content? And as good as the touchscreen is, and as good as the keyboard is for typing (with autocorrect/spellcheck), all the Flash games I've seen have required fast and accurate keyboarding and/or mousing. I think if you were to put your laptop on the floor and try to play a Flash game by using your big toe on the keyboard and the trackpad, that's what an existing Flash game on the iPhone would be like.
And besides games, what else is Flash used for? Content? The iPhone can barely handle HTML frames, how in the hell is it going to deal with some gonad's custom text box (with nonstandard scrollbars) that doesn't even respond to scroll wheel input on a standard Desktop? And what about the fact that, with a touchscreen, there is no mouse, so you don't have your regular mousein/mousedown/mouseup/mouseout states for all the fancy house-over-and-I'll-show-you-more-options crap that everyone seems to love doing?
And of course all your other points are 100% correct too. I loved the Palm Pre CES video--"you can just run as many apps as you want!" Uh-huh. The first time I get my hands on a Pre, the first thing I'm going to do is open a few apps and a bunch of web pages to see if it a) freezes or b) crashes. I figure it's pretty much gotta be one or the other.
It's a MacBook Air killer because, at 4 pounds, if you drop it on the Air a few times, the Air will probably break first.
Want safer drivers? Put an 8" steel spike in the center of the steering wheel.
For those who are still missing, the point, ask yourself this: would you want someone you care about stumbling across goatse or GNAA?
They mentioned streaming video a couple times. Anyone know if they're talking about streaming static files, or if we can finally stream LIVE video from standard servers like, oh, I don't know, maybe QuickTime/Darwin Streaming Server?
Wow... you work for Sun, you've got a five-digit UID, and it's binary? You're the ultimate Slashdot trifecta. :-)