Um, huh? I can walk into my living room or my neighbor's house and verify that these two Windows PCs are toast. Anyone else who comes to Orlando is free to do the same. Sorry no bloggers are camped out in my yard at the moment. You're going on about anecdotes versus data and you're backing this up with... a report from a conference saying that ONE hack has been done. Please go buy a dictionary and/or visit a high-school science or math teacher and get back to me. Also note that this was done by an experienced exploit-finder and he's already signed an NDA--this probably won't be on the script-kiddie networks tomorrow.
From another FA: "Is it critical? Yes. Should you be concerned? Probably not - unless you visit malicious websites often or open emails from people you don't trust. Will there be a huge outbreak of attacks based on this vulnerability? If history is any indicator, no" [emphasis mine]
Let's start with the fact that the Gimp launches each part of the program as separate programs. That is to say, in Windows, if I launch the Gimp and create a new document, I've now got three separate apps running: one called 'GIMP' which has the tools (brush, want, etc) and tool settings, one called (I shit you not) 'Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo | FG/BG, Brushes, Patterns, Gradients', and one called '*Untitled-1.0 (RGB, 1 layer) 420x300.' When I say 'separate apps' I mean that there are three separate buttons in my task bar, and when I alt-tab they show up as three separate icons. There is no good way to have a nice empty screen with nothing but your image and the tools. For someone who works like I do--create some images, save them, alt-tab to a browser, reload the web page that contains them all, look at them all together and decide what needs fixing next, and alt-tab back to the image editor--it's is an absolute clusterfuck.
It is impossible to have a nice clean screen with nothing but your image editor running with an image showing and its related tools available. If you maximize the image window, the tools disappear into the background along with Notepad and Solitaire as soon as you click on the image to apply a single brushstroke. God help you if you want to *gasp* work on more than one image at a time. And if you want to get back to your desktop, you've got to minimize (2+N) windows, where 'N' = how many images you're working on. Time to edit again? Now you get to hunt and click (2+N) buttons in your taskbar.
Let's see, what else... 'GIMP' and '*Untitled-1.0...' BOTH have menus. If the image window is small, some menu items disappear. The menus are available by right-clicking, but what's the point? I'd rather have the right button create a proper, useful, *ahem* contextual menu, as it does in every other app on the planet.
Most of these comments are left over from the last time I tried the Gimp five years ago. (Hey, at least they fixed the bug where keyboard shortcuts--like 'b' to choose the 'brush' tool--only worked when the toolbox window was active!) I actually downloaded and installed it to see if it's still as bad as I remember and yup, it sure is. I'm sure I could use it for a while longer and come up with many more bad things to say--not "this isn't like Photoshop!" bad, but "objectively, provably bad" things--but using the Gimp to find what's wrong with it is as fun as trying to come up with all the different reasons I don't like sticking forks in my eyes. (The resulting loss of vision, the mess, the pain, two more forks to wash. etc.)
"I'm not a power user when it comes to graphics packages." Ah. There it is. I'm sure many graphics professionals would have a hard time getting wound up in a Vi vs Emacs vs Notepad vs Eclipse discussion. Trust me. I've been using Windows, Linux, Macintosh computers, and Photoshop for over ten years. The Gimp was one of the first apps I played with when I first started using Linux and I've dabbled with it many times over the years. Every time, trying to do even the simplest task is like masturbating with a cheese grater. There are plenty of Linux apps I do use and get along with just fine, but the Gimp just stands out like a sore thumb. I can assure you that "the Gimp's UI sucks!" is not just a cliche, and not something you'll only hear from Photoshop fanbois.
My teenage son can demolish any PC in an afternoon of unsupervised surfing. My neighbor's Vista box barely runs; God knows what they've got on it. (Unlike the Ubuntu box I let them borrow for two years before they bought their new Dell 3 months ago.) The Mac mini my son uses to surf (when he's allowed) runs as well as it did two years ago and I haven't even run software updates on it. (No sense mentioning it has no antivirus software either.)
I don't care if it's spyware, adware, a virus, a tray icon, or or even just a simple browser toolbar or homepage or search-engine hijacking; or if it's installed manually or via drive-by methods--whether its due to small market share, inherent (UNIX) security, or something else, I will continue to argue that Mac and Linux are the better platforms, IN PRACTICE, for the average user.
Reminds me of that story a while back where they found out that keyboard indicators for caps/num/scroll lock were bright enough to semaphore a message out of a server room and down the hall.
I think you mean Morse. Unless the keyboard had little flags sticking out of it.
I'm in almost the same boat as you. My several-years-old 1 GHz PIII with W2K runs like a Swiss watch. It's much, much nicer to use than the 2.4 GHz box with XP that I have at work. Or, at least, it was, up until two months ago when my 15-year-old son ('nuff said) got on it unsupervised one afternoon. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.:-(
Somebody mod this guy down. Not because what he's saying is bad, I just want to browse this page at +5 and see only comments by Bruce. I think that would be cool. Right now there's only this comment and one other cluttering up my view.:-)
If I had a holodeck, I'd close the door and never come out until I died of exhaustion. It would be hard to convince me I should be anywhere but in the holodeck, getting my oil massage from Cindy Crawford and her simulated twin sister.
Holodecks would be very addicting. If there weren't enough holodecks to go around, I'd get the names of all the people who had reservations ahead of me and beam them into concrete walls. I'd feel tense about it, but that's exactly why I'd need a massage.
Apple's made a huge mistake in their lockdown and with any luck Google will either beat them or force them to stop being... well... Apple. (And I say this as an iPhone and Mac user...)
Fellow iPhone and Mac user here and I'd say... doubtful. How many times does this have to be proven? Apple does not care what geeks want. Ever since the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" days, Apple has been mostly ignoring the geek community and making bales of money despite this. Or maybe even because of it--despite how it seems when you spend your days on Slashdot, geeks really don't make up that much of the population. And even if we spend more moeny than average, our demands (support more hardware! support more crazy apps!) would lower profit margins. You saw the roadmap event, I assume? Didja see their sales numbers? Apple could have skipped an SKD for another six months, another year, forever... and iPhones would still be selling just fine.
Maybe someone will be at least be able to create a good webkit-based browser? If nothing else, I'd love to have the ability to "right-click" (press-and-hold, like on a PocketPC) on a link and open in a new window, or save a file (assuming they give you some kind of local file storage.) Plus a button to force it to render minimally-formatted pages at 100% (maybe insert a 'viewport' tag into the document?) instead of having to pan-and-zoom. (It renders them OK in landscape, but I'd like to force that behavior in portrait mode as well.) That would make it great for reading documentation.
Also, it should be able to use a custom/etc/hosts file to block ads or some other adblocking scheme. I block ads on my desktop, so not only do I hate seeing them on my iPhone, I really hate seeing them on my iPhone since they take longer to download and render and take up precious screen real estate. (Plus I pay for Yahoo mail so I don't see ads--but they serve ads to me on the mobile version anyway! No, I don't want to use the iPhone's mail app for my Yahoo mail.)
And if anyone reading is/plans to be an iPhone app dev, I'd also like an app that lets me determine which way is south based on the time of day--that would make a great addition to Google Maps. Just draw an analog clock face (adjusted for DST if needed) with 12 at the top and two lines: one says "point at sun" and the other says "south is that way."
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
on
Donkey Kong and Me
·
· Score: 4, Funny
And he's now hosting his blog on that very same Atari he used oh-so-many years ago.
Just for fun I thought I'd take a look. I tried to watch the 80s/90s one ( rtsp://live.mobitv.com:554/96-CDMA.sdp ) but it wouldn't load--just went to 'paused' mode. For fun I went to http://live.mobitv.com/ and was greeted by a plain-vanilla RHEL/Apache2 page. Yeah, these guys run a real tight ship.
If you are a member of the general public:
The fact that you are seeing this page indicates that the website you just visited is either experiencing problems, or is undergoing routine maintenance.
If you would like to let the administrators of this website know that you've seen this page instead of the page you expected, you should send them e-mail.
I'm pretty sure it's stock because the line that says "You may now add content to the directory/var/www/html/" is dynamically generated. For fuck's sake, it even says right on the freaking page, "To prevent this page from ever being used, follow the instructions in the file/etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf." Hell, you don't even have to do that much--just say rm/var/www/html/index* and then touch/var/www/html/index.html.
The good news is, even if the C&D works, the videos will still be finable via a search engine--there's no robots.txt file, either.
Anyone want a job as a web admin at mobitv.com? They'll probably have an opening soon, and evidently no experience is necessary.:-)
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous...
See also 'BeOS.' Watch it boot in 20 seconds after POST and then watch it play back a half-dozen 320x240 quicktime movies at the same time without dropping any frames. On a 300 MHz AMD K6/2 with 64 MB RAM.
Then see how they went under despite all this. The most powerful force in the computing world is inertia.
Excellent summary. I had come to most of the same conclusions as you but I will use your comment as a template for any future arguments I make.:-) I would like to add one more thing: screen size. Especially for games, the screen size is a big limitation--most Flash games are authored at a size much larger than the iPhone's native resolution of 320x480, and for a game more than anything, the iPhone's pan-and-zoom navigation system would not work. (Plus the keyboard, which most games need, would take up even more of the screen, and is hard to use accurately and quickly, which would again make games unplayable.)
So if it can't be played on a small screen, and it can't be played by panning around... it can't be played.
This is hysterical. 'WebSlices' are similar to Safari's Web Clip feature. Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox. (And Saft gives it to Safari.) And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new? In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So... it's called a "favorites" bar now so users will think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!" rather than the old "links" name which led users to think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!"? Ooh, and it can hold links to documents as well? Er, yeah, that makes a lot of sense... I've always felt that the biggest thing missing from a web browser was access to random local documents. Because there aren't enough other ways to access often-needed files.
For example, the macbook air isn't very good as a main computer, and the lack of 3G iphones has to do with battery life - Apple has chosen to offer certain features which are mutually exclusive with other features - I'm glad someone... respectable... is saying it!
Or you could just buy a tablet PC. And then likely discover, as I did, that as neat as they are, they just aren't that great. They get heavy, quickly, and the screen resolution isn't that great--you can fit many more notes on a paper pad with a pen than you can onto a screen. And you HAVE to use that stylus, as opposed to a paper pad, which you can walk around with and use with any pen or pencil you find lying around. The one thing the tablet was great for was doing inventory with a USB scanner--zip, data went from the object to the scanner to the tablet to an online database. Other than that, I don't really miss it. (Mine died a year ago.)
When Disney discovered in 1989 that three Hallandale, Florida, day care centers had 5-foot-high likenesses of trademarked Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and Goofy painted on their walls, Disney threatened to go to court if the centers did not remove the drawings. The threat of legal action did not need to be carried out, as the centers replaced the drawings with cartoon characters belonging to Universal Studios Florida and Hanna-Barbera Productions, who volunteered the use of their character art as part of a publicity ploy...
Universal, still smarting from the early opening of [Disney MGM Studios in Orlando, FL]... saw in the day care controversy a way to seize some publicity for themselves and give Disney a bad name in Florida as part of the bargain. Accordingly, Universal Studios Florida and Hanna-Barbera Productions offered the centers the use of characters from their own cartoons, such as Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Yogi Bear. Universal and Hanna-Barbera then held a special ceremony showcasing the newly-redecorated day care centers at the Temple Messanique on 8 August 1989, attended by costumed characters and executives from both organizations.
Sony still has time. They should jump all over this.
Yea, I can vouch for that. I sent in my 360 a couple weeks ago and I just got it back. It had a cool retro Atari sticker on it but the one I got back has a bunch of people's names on it and shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, huh? I can walk into my living room or my neighbor's house and verify that these two Windows PCs are toast. Anyone else who comes to Orlando is free to do the same. Sorry no bloggers are camped out in my yard at the moment. You're going on about anecdotes versus data and you're backing this up with... a report from a conference saying that ONE hack has been done. Please go buy a dictionary and/or visit a high-school science or math teacher and get back to me. Also note that this was done by an experienced exploit-finder and he's already signed an NDA--this probably won't be on the script-kiddie networks tomorrow.
From another FA: "Is it critical? Yes. Should you be concerned? Probably not - unless you visit malicious websites often or open emails from people you don't trust. Will there be a huge outbreak of attacks based on this vulnerability? If history is any indicator, no" [emphasis mine]
THE GIMP's UI SUCKS ROCKS.
Let's start with the fact that the Gimp launches each part of the program as separate programs. That is to say, in Windows, if I launch the Gimp and create a new document, I've now got three separate apps running: one called 'GIMP' which has the tools (brush, want, etc) and tool settings, one called (I shit you not) 'Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo | FG/BG, Brushes, Patterns, Gradients', and one called '*Untitled-1.0 (RGB, 1 layer) 420x300.' When I say 'separate apps' I mean that there are three separate buttons in my task bar, and when I alt-tab they show up as three separate icons. There is no good way to have a nice empty screen with nothing but your image and the tools. For someone who works like I do--create some images, save them, alt-tab to a browser, reload the web page that contains them all, look at them all together and decide what needs fixing next, and alt-tab back to the image editor--it's is an absolute clusterfuck.
It is impossible to have a nice clean screen with nothing but your image editor running with an image showing and its related tools available. If you maximize the image window, the tools disappear into the background along with Notepad and Solitaire as soon as you click on the image to apply a single brushstroke. God help you if you want to *gasp* work on more than one image at a time. And if you want to get back to your desktop, you've got to minimize (2+N) windows, where 'N' = how many images you're working on. Time to edit again? Now you get to hunt and click (2+N) buttons in your taskbar.
Let's see, what else... 'GIMP' and '*Untitled-1.0...' BOTH have menus. If the image window is small, some menu items disappear. The menus are available by right-clicking, but what's the point? I'd rather have the right button create a proper, useful, *ahem* contextual menu, as it does in every other app on the planet.
Most of these comments are left over from the last time I tried the Gimp five years ago. (Hey, at least they fixed the bug where keyboard shortcuts--like 'b' to choose the 'brush' tool--only worked when the toolbox window was active!) I actually downloaded and installed it to see if it's still as bad as I remember and yup, it sure is. I'm sure I could use it for a while longer and come up with many more bad things to say--not "this isn't like Photoshop!" bad, but "objectively, provably bad" things--but using the Gimp to find what's wrong with it is as fun as trying to come up with all the different reasons I don't like sticking forks in my eyes. (The resulting loss of vision, the mess, the pain, two more forks to wash. etc.)
"I'm not a power user when it comes to graphics packages." Ah. There it is. I'm sure many graphics professionals would have a hard time getting wound up in a Vi vs Emacs vs Notepad vs Eclipse discussion. Trust me. I've been using Windows, Linux, Macintosh computers, and Photoshop for over ten years. The Gimp was one of the first apps I played with when I first started using Linux and I've dabbled with it many times over the years. Every time, trying to do even the simplest task is like masturbating with a cheese grater. There are plenty of Linux apps I do use and get along with just fine, but the Gimp just stands out like a sore thumb. I can assure you that "the Gimp's UI sucks!" is not just a cliche, and not something you'll only hear from Photoshop fanbois.
My teenage son can demolish any PC in an afternoon of unsupervised surfing. My neighbor's Vista box barely runs; God knows what they've got on it. (Unlike the Ubuntu box I let them borrow for two years before they bought their new Dell 3 months ago.) The Mac mini my son uses to surf (when he's allowed) runs as well as it did two years ago and I haven't even run software updates on it. (No sense mentioning it has no antivirus software either.)
I don't care if it's spyware, adware, a virus, a tray icon, or or even just a simple browser toolbar or homepage or search-engine hijacking; or if it's installed manually or via drive-by methods--whether its due to small market share, inherent (UNIX) security, or something else, I will continue to argue that Mac and Linux are the better platforms, IN PRACTICE, for the average user.
Looking at the pics what caught my eye was this one. 7 years in the future and people are STILL demanding XP instead of Vista!
And let those uppity assholes in Texas be the biggest state again? Fuck that. They're arrogant enough as it is.
If you wanna do something useful, cut yourself in half and make them drop to third place.
Reminds me of that story a while back where they found out that keyboard indicators for caps/num/scroll lock were bright enough to semaphore a message out of a server room and down the hall.
I think you mean Morse. Unless the keyboard had little flags sticking out of it.
often pounding away the whole day in FF
I'm the same way... but not in Wikis.
I'm in almost the same boat as you. My several-years-old 1 GHz PIII with W2K runs like a Swiss watch. It's much, much nicer to use than the 2.4 GHz box with XP that I have at work. Or, at least, it was, up until two months ago when my 15-year-old son ('nuff said) got on it unsupervised one afternoon. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. :-(
Somebody mod this guy down. Not because what he's saying is bad, I just want to browse this page at +5 and see only comments by Bruce. I think that would be cool. Right now there's only this comment and one other cluttering up my view. :-)
Apple's made a huge mistake in their lockdown and with any luck Google will either beat them or force them to stop being... well... Apple. (And I say this as an iPhone and Mac user...)
Fellow iPhone and Mac user here and I'd say... doubtful. How many times does this have to be proven? Apple does not care what geeks want. Ever since the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" days, Apple has been mostly ignoring the geek community and making bales of money despite this. Or maybe even because of it--despite how it seems when you spend your days on Slashdot, geeks really don't make up that much of the population. And even if we spend more moeny than average, our demands (support more hardware! support more crazy apps!) would lower profit margins. You saw the roadmap event, I assume? Didja see their sales numbers? Apple could have skipped an SKD for another six months, another year, forever... and iPhones would still be selling just fine.
Maybe someone will be at least be able to create a good webkit-based browser? If nothing else, I'd love to have the ability to "right-click" (press-and-hold, like on a PocketPC) on a link and open in a new window, or save a file (assuming they give you some kind of local file storage.) Plus a button to force it to render minimally-formatted pages at 100% (maybe insert a 'viewport' tag into the document?) instead of having to pan-and-zoom. (It renders them OK in landscape, but I'd like to force that behavior in portrait mode as well.) That would make it great for reading documentation.
/etc/hosts file to block ads or some other adblocking scheme. I block ads on my desktop, so not only do I hate seeing them on my iPhone, I really hate seeing them on my iPhone since they take longer to download and render and take up precious screen real estate. (Plus I pay for Yahoo mail so I don't see ads--but they serve ads to me on the mobile version anyway! No, I don't want to use the iPhone's mail app for my Yahoo mail.)
Also, it should be able to use a custom
And if anyone reading is/plans to be an iPhone app dev, I'd also like an app that lets me determine which way is south based on the time of day--that would make a great addition to Google Maps. Just draw an analog clock face (adjusted for DST if needed) with 12 at the top and two lines: one says "point at sun" and the other says "south is that way."
And he's now hosting his blog on that very same Atari he used oh-so-many years ago.
The good news is, even if the C&D works, the videos will still be finable via a search engine--there's no robots.txt file, either.
Anyone want a job as a web admin at mobitv.com? They'll probably have an opening soon, and evidently no experience is necessary.
No, no, no... with MS it's not good until version three. And just to be sure, I myself am waiting for Silverlight 3.11 for Workgroups.
GAMES, in general, will work just fine, no doubt about it. EXISTING FLASH GAMES, on the other hand, absolutely won't.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous...
See also 'BeOS.' Watch it boot in 20 seconds after POST and then watch it play back a half-dozen 320x240 quicktime movies at the same time without dropping any frames. On a 300 MHz AMD K6/2 with 64 MB RAM.
Then see how they went under despite all this. The most powerful force in the computing world is inertia.
Excellent summary. I had come to most of the same conclusions as you but I will use your comment as a template for any future arguments I make. :-) I would like to add one more thing: screen size. Especially for games, the screen size is a big limitation--most Flash games are authored at a size much larger than the iPhone's native resolution of 320x480, and for a game more than anything, the iPhone's pan-and-zoom navigation system would not work. (Plus the keyboard, which most games need, would take up even more of the screen, and is hard to use accurately and quickly, which would again make games unplayable.)
So if it can't be played on a small screen, and it can't be played by panning around... it can't be played.
This is hysterical. 'WebSlices' are similar to Safari's Web Clip feature. Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox. (And Saft gives it to Safari.) And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new? In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. So... it's called a "favorites" bar now so users will think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!" rather than the old "links" name which led users to think "aha! I can put links to my favorite things here!"? Ooh, and it can hold links to documents as well? Er, yeah, that makes a lot of sense... I've always felt that the biggest thing missing from a web browser was access to random local documents. Because there aren't enough other ways to access often-needed files.
Dude, your just making it worse. You should of not posted that. Try and be nicer next time. :-)
For example, the macbook air isn't very good as a main computer, and the lack of 3G iphones has to do with battery life - Apple has chosen to offer certain features which are mutually exclusive with other features - I'm glad someone ... respectable ... is saying it!
New flash: All design is compromise. Film at 11.
Or you could just buy a tablet PC. And then likely discover, as I did, that as neat as they are, they just aren't that great. They get heavy, quickly, and the screen resolution isn't that great--you can fit many more notes on a paper pad with a pen than you can onto a screen. And you HAVE to use that stylus, as opposed to a paper pad, which you can walk around with and use with any pen or pencil you find lying around. The one thing the tablet was great for was doing inventory with a USB scanner--zip, data went from the object to the scanner to the tablet to an online database. Other than that, I don't really miss it. (Mine died a year ago.)
Yea, I can vouch for that. I sent in my 360 a couple weeks ago and I just got it back. It had a cool retro Atari sticker on it but the one I got back has a bunch of people's names on it and shit.