GNOME Terminal is actually a wrapper for VTE, which is a rewrite of ZVT.
More than anything, I think it just needs more attention.
The bugs pile up, but VTE is basically maintained by an overworked Red Hat developer.
One person attempted a hefty rewrite, but ended up forking to the Multi Gnome Terminal.
anything that is mass-distributed (like Lotus Notes or Turbo Tax) that has used copy protection either removed said copy protection or stopped selling their product
Allow me to state the obvious: Microsoft is a monopolist with $50 billion in the bank.
I would like to believe that the market will punish these increasingly consumer-hostile moves.
However, with a market saturated by both authorized and unauthorized users, I think Microsoft will accept losing some market share in exchange for increasing revenue per user.
Am I the only one left who prefers clean bit-mapped fonts?
It depends on the resolution.
Mac displays are usually about 100 dpi, and I like the way they look.
On my 19" LCD, which is closer to 85 dpi, I prefer to make text a single pixel wide with fonts like Trebuchet and Andale Mono.
In neither case do I use tiny fonts to "get a lot of work done."
Canadians don't want to be considered foreign to USA, and I definately don't want to be considered foreign in Canada
I worked with a guy from Barhead, and he was always the first to crack a Canadian joke, or make fun of the way we talked.
(I say Java, you say Jahva, let's call the whole thing off.)
I didn't have the greatest introduction to him, because he was the cheap replacement for a friend who had just been laid off, but we became friends.
I think a lot of Americans don't understand Canada.
Some think of it as the 51st state, whereas others wonder whether Canadians speak English.
I was surprised by how critical my colleague was of French Canadians.
(Apparently, the feeling is mutual.)
I find it very difficult to think that she would have trouble finding another employer to cover the relatively insignificant filing fees for the visa.
The "indentured servants" are usually those applying for a green card.
If you switch jobs, you have to start over the green card process.
This is scary for two reasons: the process takes a long time (about two years), and you only have so much time to do it (six years, I think).
I work with some people who were part of a corporate acquisition, and they were very stressed about having to start over.
For all we know, they patched something completely unrelated, and moved a memory offset that Real's code depended on.
The basic architecture of FairPlay is that each song is encrypted with a user key, and the user keys are encrypted with a system key.
From time to time, Apple deliberately changes the procedure for deriving the system key.
It started as a simple protocol involving MD5, AES, and some secret strings, but it has gotten messier over time.
These changes are what break Hymn.
In fact, Apple went so far as to disable playback of files that appeared to be de-DRMed.
The only reason Apple could recognize those files is because Hymn left the Apple ID in the file, to discourage its use for piracy.
The work around is to strip the ID or somehow munge the field.
I don't know how Real integrates with FairPlay, but I suspect that it somehow depends on the system key.
Real is playing with fire by advertising compatibility with a hostile device, but make no mistake: Apple's changes are deliberate.
I think Apple stands to gain by allowing anyone to licence Fairplay
Fairplay depends largely on security through obscurity, so its algorithm changes from time to time with an iTunes or firmware release.
Licensees would hamper its flexibility in this regard.
Why should I buy an iPod over any of the other MP3 players out there like the Creative Zen?
I bought my wife a 20 GB iPod (3G) on the strength of the user interface.
The iRiver was the strongest competition at the time, and it was not pleasant to use.
I've since bought an iPod mini to use at the gym, and the click wheel is even better than the previous design.
There are players with better specs. and lower prices.
I have yet to find one that can compete with the iPod design.
"shipped with software..." is a parenthetical.
5.7 million lines is the right order of magnitude for the kernel.
A useful Linux distribution would be closer to the 40 million lines estimated for Windows.
CRTs have had refresh rates of 75hz for years while LCDs are only up to 25ms (40hz) and 16ms (62.5hz) and CRTs can still faster.
No one questions that CRTs have better response time than LCDs.
The grand parent is pointing out the eye strain-inducing effects of a constantly refreshing CRT.
Most people are comfortable at 85 Hz, but some have problems at any rate.
For my 9 to 5, I'll take an LCD over a CRT.
despite doing what they did, they are enjoying record-breaking sales
Most people who preordered or purchased early did not know about Half-Life 2's activation scheme.
None of the reviews I've read so far mention it at all.
It remains to be seen how much the press will make of it, and whether people will care.
I was very much looking forward to playing Half-Life 2, but I won't so long as E.T. phones home.
There's plenty of competition for my gaming dollars and time.
they should be innovating new technologies that make machines insensitive to dictionary attacks
Dictionary attacks were difficult in the olden days, because password hashes were expensive to compute (on the order of a second each).
Hardware has caught up, so that hundreds of candidates can be tested per second.
Password strengthening is a scheme that adds a significant amount of random salt to the password.
To use the password, you have to brute force the salt.
This slows down legitimate authentication, but it also slows down a dictionary attack.
Stretching is a special case of this scheme that uses repeated hashing, instead of random salt.
Instead of storing the hash of a password, store the hash after a couple thousand iterations.
If the algorithm is good, there is no shortcut to the end hash value.
If it hasn't been done already, I imagine it would be a simple matter to implement as a PAM module.
[CBS] had a guy in the "Data Room" with this awesome touch-screen interface.
He could navigate it really quickly too, and it looked natural.
I believe it was Alias PortfolioWall.
I've seen it used primarily with gestures, which never seemed to work well.
People would drag right for the next slide, but get so lost that an assistant at the keyboard had to help.
The guy on TV stuck to simple button pushing and map zooming, which was effective.
We like to spend in the range of $1500 per desktop.
For some reason, our company has more or less standardized on Dell laptops.
I'm due for an upgrade, and I think I can talk my manager into a 20" iMac, instead.
I considered the PowerMac, but I'd like a monitor, too, and the iMac's looks pretty good.
It's funny, I wouldn't buy the iMac for home use, mainly because I want a better video card for games.
It seems like a terrific fit for work, though.
I grew up in a house that was evenly split between PCs and Macs.
I always bought PCs, because they were a better value.
Now, after having bought an iPod and an iBook, I'm looking at an iMac.
It's not their fault, but GNUstep isn't exactly ubiquitous, so it's not a shoo-in for Unix development.
After spending some time with the Xcode tutorials, I was eager to try Objective C on Linux.
I then realized that a lot of what was cool about ObjC was in the foundation framework, which was part of GNUstep.
Since this wasn't packaged for either of my readily available distributions (SuSE and Red Hat), I built it from source, which was routine, but non trivial.
After GNUstep was finally installed, it took a few trips to Google to figure out how to actually compile a program.
It turns out that GCC for OS X has some options that are not present on Linux, such as (IIRC) -framework.
The other problem had something to do with having to add code to enable garbage collection.
The final annoyance I encountered, before moving on to other projects, was the lack of autoconf support for Objective C.
Again, it's not their fault, but ObjC/*Step feels like a second-class development environment on Linux.
If you're leading a software project and reading books like these your project is already screwed.
In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister assert that "the average software developer... doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one."
I'd be pretty happy to learn that my manager is reading a computer book, especially one without "24 hours" or "dummies" in the title.
Re:Linux user considering buying an iBook
on
The Ultimate MacDate
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Are there any features/characteristics of x86 Linux machines that are lacking on OS X machines?
If you're the sort of person who lives in Emacs, be aware that the iBook's Ctrl key sucks.
I wonder if it's possible to swap Ctrl and Caps Lock.
What? Projecting the test cases before the software is written?
It's an iterative process.
You don't necessarily write a complete suite of tests for your interfaces before you start writing a single implementation.
Someone in QA might think of a unit test as white box, but they tend to be black box from the perspective of the developer.
You should be able to write a unit test before writing the unit.
The point of most unit tests is to verify an implementation's conformance to its interface.
When you later change the implementation, you would likely invalidate a white-box test or, if it still happens to be valid, weaken its premise.
now we support HP/UX (still a pain), and 4 looking at going to 6 Linux version/distributions
Automated building and testing really pay off when adding new platforms.
We recently added IA64 Linux.
We already supported IA32 Linux and IA64 HP-UX, so we had most of the C and assembler we needed.
Great, we should have a new platform by Friday.
Well, the automated tests we've accumulated over the last five years found bugs in places I never would have thought to look if I were testing by hand.
Now we're adding OS X, and it's the same story: we already support PowerPC AIX, and a bunch of mostly SysV-ish platforms.
There have been challenges, like educating people about the difference between dylibs and bundles, but it's manageable.
I develop some testing utilities in C that need to work on all of these platforms, so I deal with the same problems our developers and release engineers do.
I'm not integrated with the home-grown build harness the release engineers use, so I've been getting friendly (or at least tolerably acquainted) with autoconf and friends.
It's funny: we use Perforce, but I would trade it in a heartbeat for Mozilla's CVS tools.
I'd also take Bugzilla over our home-grown bug database.
The trouble with "storytelling" in games is that it locks the player into a canned plot....
Progress is now made by figuring out how to make free-play worlds more interesting, not by locking the user down to a plot track.
This is a fair description of the state of the art, but I think we can do better.
Consider the relationship between animated and live-action movies.
Would a faithful remake of Gone with the Wind as an animated feature be interesting?
Probably not.
Part of the point of animation is to do things that you can't do in the real world.
Similarly, games that emulate movies aren't that interesting.
That doesn't mean that storytelling can't enhance the experience.
A "free-play" world is a fine goal, but what are you going to do in that world?
Hard-core players enjoy the career mode of a racing game, the franchise mode of a sports game, or the campaign mode of a war game.
Storytelling can appeal to that desire for continuity.
The challenge is to do so without overly inhibiting the player.
The conclusions that I drew are financially unreachable at this time.
As well as the age-old problem that I think any interactive fiction will ever have: lack of interest.
You've gotten a couple of encouraging replies, and I'll add one more.
It is often said that the game industry doesn't need any more "idea people."
Looking at the current market, I don't agree.
Develop your ideas so that you can pitch them to a team capable of realizing them.
Prototype with hypertext, or even paper.
Today's market may seem to be dominated by first-person shooters, but The Sims proved that there is a market for something different.
Slashdot Mirror
One person attempted a hefty rewrite, but ended up forking to the Multi Gnome Terminal.
Allow me to state the obvious: Microsoft is a monopolist with $50 billion in the bank. I would like to believe that the market will punish these increasingly consumer-hostile moves. However, with a market saturated by both authorized and unauthorized users, I think Microsoft will accept losing some market share in exchange for increasing revenue per user.
90% of everything is crap. Blogs are no exception. It's just a medium, which, I'll admit, doesn't yet have its Anne Frank.
You couldn't pay me to own a bunch of typo. domain names. It sounds like a thousand lawsuits waiting to happen.
It depends on the resolution. Mac displays are usually about 100 dpi, and I like the way they look. On my 19" LCD, which is closer to 85 dpi, I prefer to make text a single pixel wide with fonts like Trebuchet and Andale Mono. In neither case do I use tiny fonts to "get a lot of work done."
I worked with a guy from Barhead, and he was always the first to crack a Canadian joke, or make fun of the way we talked. (I say Java, you say Jahva, let's call the whole thing off.) I didn't have the greatest introduction to him, because he was the cheap replacement for a friend who had just been laid off, but we became friends.
I think a lot of Americans don't understand Canada. Some think of it as the 51st state, whereas others wonder whether Canadians speak English. I was surprised by how critical my colleague was of French Canadians. (Apparently, the feeling is mutual.)
The "indentured servants" are usually those applying for a green card. If you switch jobs, you have to start over the green card process. This is scary for two reasons: the process takes a long time (about two years), and you only have so much time to do it (six years, I think).
I work with some people who were part of a corporate acquisition, and they were very stressed about having to start over.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but house cleaning, tutoring, and spyware removal aren't exactly 9 - 5 jobs, so the hourly rate is misleading.
The basic architecture of FairPlay is that each song is encrypted with a user key, and the user keys are encrypted with a system key. From time to time, Apple deliberately changes the procedure for deriving the system key. It started as a simple protocol involving MD5, AES, and some secret strings, but it has gotten messier over time.
These changes are what break Hymn. In fact, Apple went so far as to disable playback of files that appeared to be de-DRMed. The only reason Apple could recognize those files is because Hymn left the Apple ID in the file, to discourage its use for piracy. The work around is to strip the ID or somehow munge the field.
I don't know how Real integrates with FairPlay, but I suspect that it somehow depends on the system key. Real is playing with fire by advertising compatibility with a hostile device, but make no mistake: Apple's changes are deliberate.
Fairplay depends largely on security through obscurity, so its algorithm changes from time to time with an iTunes or firmware release. Licensees would hamper its flexibility in this regard.
I bought my wife a 20 GB iPod (3G) on the strength of the user interface. The iRiver was the strongest competition at the time, and it was not pleasant to use. I've since bought an iPod mini to use at the gym, and the click wheel is even better than the previous design.
There are players with better specs. and lower prices. I have yet to find one that can compete with the iPod design.
"shipped with software ..." is a parenthetical.
5.7 million lines is the right order of magnitude for the kernel.
A useful Linux distribution would be closer to the 40 million lines estimated for Windows.
The CIA already launches Hellfire missiles from the Predator. It killed a U.S. citizen in Yemen a couple of years ago.
No one questions that CRTs have better response time than LCDs. The grand parent is pointing out the eye strain-inducing effects of a constantly refreshing CRT. Most people are comfortable at 85 Hz, but some have problems at any rate. For my 9 to 5, I'll take an LCD over a CRT.
Most people who preordered or purchased early did not know about Half-Life 2's activation scheme. None of the reviews I've read so far mention it at all. It remains to be seen how much the press will make of it, and whether people will care.
I was very much looking forward to playing Half-Life 2, but I won't so long as E.T. phones home. There's plenty of competition for my gaming dollars and time.
Dictionary attacks were difficult in the olden days, because password hashes were expensive to compute (on the order of a second each). Hardware has caught up, so that hundreds of candidates can be tested per second.
Password strengthening is a scheme that adds a significant amount of random salt to the password. To use the password, you have to brute force the salt. This slows down legitimate authentication, but it also slows down a dictionary attack.
Stretching is a special case of this scheme that uses repeated hashing, instead of random salt. Instead of storing the hash of a password, store the hash after a couple thousand iterations. If the algorithm is good, there is no shortcut to the end hash value.
If it hasn't been done already, I imagine it would be a simple matter to implement as a PAM module.
I believe it was Alias PortfolioWall. I've seen it used primarily with gestures, which never seemed to work well. People would drag right for the next slide, but get so lost that an assistant at the keyboard had to help. The guy on TV stuck to simple button pushing and map zooming, which was effective.
For some reason, our company has more or less standardized on Dell laptops. I'm due for an upgrade, and I think I can talk my manager into a 20" iMac, instead. I considered the PowerMac, but I'd like a monitor, too, and the iMac's looks pretty good. It's funny, I wouldn't buy the iMac for home use, mainly because I want a better video card for games. It seems like a terrific fit for work, though.
I grew up in a house that was evenly split between PCs and Macs. I always bought PCs, because they were a better value. Now, after having bought an iPod and an iBook, I'm looking at an iMac.
After GNUstep was finally installed, it took a few trips to Google to figure out how to actually compile a program. It turns out that GCC for OS X has some options that are not present on Linux, such as (IIRC) -framework. The other problem had something to do with having to add code to enable garbage collection.
The final annoyance I encountered, before moving on to other projects, was the lack of autoconf support for Objective C. Again, it's not their fault, but ObjC/*Step feels like a second-class development environment on Linux.
In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister assert that "the average software developer ... doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one."
I'd be pretty happy to learn that my manager is reading a computer book, especially one without "24 hours" or "dummies" in the title.
If you're the sort of person who lives in Emacs, be aware that the iBook's Ctrl key sucks. I wonder if it's possible to swap Ctrl and Caps Lock.
It's an iterative process. You don't necessarily write a complete suite of tests for your interfaces before you start writing a single implementation. Someone in QA might think of a unit test as white box, but they tend to be black box from the perspective of the developer. You should be able to write a unit test before writing the unit.
The point of most unit tests is to verify an implementation's conformance to its interface. When you later change the implementation, you would likely invalidate a white-box test or, if it still happens to be valid, weaken its premise.
Automated building and testing really pay off when adding new platforms. We recently added IA64 Linux. We already supported IA32 Linux and IA64 HP-UX, so we had most of the C and assembler we needed. Great, we should have a new platform by Friday. Well, the automated tests we've accumulated over the last five years found bugs in places I never would have thought to look if I were testing by hand. Now we're adding OS X, and it's the same story: we already support PowerPC AIX, and a bunch of mostly SysV-ish platforms. There have been challenges, like educating people about the difference between dylibs and bundles, but it's manageable.
I develop some testing utilities in C that need to work on all of these platforms, so I deal with the same problems our developers and release engineers do. I'm not integrated with the home-grown build harness the release engineers use, so I've been getting friendly (or at least tolerably acquainted) with autoconf and friends. It's funny: we use Perforce, but I would trade it in a heartbeat for Mozilla's CVS tools. I'd also take Bugzilla over our home-grown bug database.
This is a fair description of the state of the art, but I think we can do better. Consider the relationship between animated and live-action movies. Would a faithful remake of Gone with the Wind as an animated feature be interesting? Probably not. Part of the point of animation is to do things that you can't do in the real world. Similarly, games that emulate movies aren't that interesting. That doesn't mean that storytelling can't enhance the experience.
A "free-play" world is a fine goal, but what are you going to do in that world? Hard-core players enjoy the career mode of a racing game, the franchise mode of a sports game, or the campaign mode of a war game. Storytelling can appeal to that desire for continuity. The challenge is to do so without overly inhibiting the player.
You've gotten a couple of encouraging replies, and I'll add one more. It is often said that the game industry doesn't need any more "idea people." Looking at the current market, I don't agree. Develop your ideas so that you can pitch them to a team capable of realizing them. Prototype with hypertext, or even paper. Today's market may seem to be dominated by first-person shooters, but The Sims proved that there is a market for something different.