i'll buy one. hell, i'll order ten of them for my office...
the day quark xpress 6 comes out.
seriously. the only reason i and a good many other mac IT folks with purchasing power have still got previous generation macs on our desks is that f*ing quark xpress isn't X native yet. the new G4s don't boot in 9, so it's not an option to dual-boot or run 9 and wait to upgrade to X. everybody i've talked to pretty much agrees, apple needs to light a fire under quark. or maybe buy them, since apple seems to have eaten up all the companies that make video editing software to create final cut and dvd studio. maybe an apple iQuark...
anyhoo, the day xpress 6 is available, apple will immediately see a spike in sales of new systems and OS X boxes. i'd be willing to put money on it.
Quark has had 2+ years now to carbonize xpress. i thought adobe was lagging with photoshop being so late to the game, but quark makes them look like early adopters by comparison. and with every day they don't have a carbonized xpress, their market share in the heavy mac-using print graphics world is eroding away, given over in droves to adobe indesign.
probably off-topic, but i felt a rant coming on and this was a target of opportunity.
from the post (not having bothered to read the article, as it seems there's no point...):...administered over the Ethernet interface or via an insecure (non WEP) wireless connection, an attacker that can sniff the network can obtain administrative access to the AirPort (emphasis mine)
well, big frickin' duh, if you'll pardon my french.
if i administrate any computer or for that matter any access point via an insecure connection or any connection that can be sniffed by an intruder well, no doubt it can be compromised!
why is this news? why, more specifically is this apple news?
why not create a new/. section - commonsense.slashdot.org - to address these kinds of posts.
i thought this line from the article was a giveaway that it was written by a woman - not a dig in any way, just something to note:
Lizzie McGuire is a live-action Ally McBeal for kids on The Disney Channel and it's a huge hit with girls, and boys oddly enough.
however, it was written by someone named Gerard, which, traditionally, is a male name.
so i have to ask, Gerard, do you remember being a pre-teen/young teenager? we're talking about a show in which the title character, and presumably most of the other main characters, are (A) female, and (B) probably fairly attractive if they're on a TV show, and, if given A and B, probably dressed like little pre-teen whores.
sorry, not whores... too harsh. tramps maybe. sluts. women of negotiable affection.
you know what i mean - all the fashionable girls, and thus their little sisters who don't know any better, are wearing midriff shirts that show their stomachs, lowrider pants that show their asses, and not a lot else. and lots of makeup.
is it any wonder little boys, who very quickly go straight from "girls? yuck!" to "girls? damn!" are tuning in?
offtopic? yes... but one must understand one's target audience...
the descent of american television quality into the realm of craptitude we see today is entirely due to the PTA and the AARP - the two most powerful organizations in the US other than the NRA, mostly because the NRA has guns. some of us in the underground plan to put guns in the hands of teachers and retirees and see what happens next...
since it was long ago discovered that kids that watch too much TV are less intelligent and less respectful of their elders than quiet kids that read books, the PTAARP quetly infiltrated the american television indistry, specifically the animation production companies, planting ever increasingly insipid, politically correct and above all boring show concepts into the project pipelines. high-level PTAARP sympathizers at the networks green-lit these projects, diluting the quality of child-oriented televised animation and quietly killing off the spirit of america's cartoon-watching youth.
not being the brightest of the teachers and retirees out there (that segment of the PTAARP already having been recruited by the government for thought-control experiments and school-lunch programs) the plan actually backfired somewhat. rather than turn off the TV and read books, or go outside and enjoy nature on saturday mornings, america's youth adapted to and came to accept the new, milquetoast offerings. rather than breeding a more intelligent, more fit generation of americans, the program instead has been turning out americans more and more accepting of establishment, and less likely to change their habits to conform with a changing enviroment.
some have said that the program was subverted from within by a splinter group of the Young Republicans to just this end
meanwhile, the writers of decent cartoons have abandoned the youth market and instead targeted adults, to the benefit of the growing adult cartoon market, a short-lived market segment, not only because these are the last generation of adults who grew up with quality youth-oriented cartoons, but also because they still spend their leisure time on a couch watching TV instead of exercizing.
after all, human actors are all so finicky and outdated.
plus, there's nothing quite like hearing zarvox give the pronouncement that "rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead!"
reminds me of that black stunt ship
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 4, Funny
i hope douglas will excuse this:
. ..
Zaphod's attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato's limo. His mouths hung open.
"That," he said, "that... is really bad for the eyes..." Ford looked. He too stood astonished.
It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it.
"It's so... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape... light just seems to fall into it!"
Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love.
The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.
"Your eyes just slide off it..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.
Zaphod moved forward to it, slowly, like a man possessed - or more accurately like a man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke it. His hand stopped. His hand reached out to stroke it again. His hand stopped again.
"Come and feel the surface," he said in a hushed voice.
Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped.
"You... you can't..." he said.
"See?" said Zaphod, "it's just totally frictionless. This must be one mother of a mover..."
He turned to look at Ford seriously. At least, one of his heads did - the other stayed gazing in awe at the ship.
"What do you reckon, Ford?" he said.
"You mean... er..." Ford looked over his shoulder. "You mean stroll off with it? You think we should?"
"No."
"Nor do I."
"But we're going to, aren't we?"
"How can we not?"
. ..
offtopic, yes, but somewhat more in the vein of discussion, how does it do on reflecting, say, radar?
i need to update that page. i posted it a couple years ago when the company i work for was working on the first redhat annual report - which folds out into a poster with the word "open" across the front. there were some ideas thrown out for what to put on the back of the poster; at the beginning it was just going to be blank to save money, IIRC.
being the "web guy" and the only person at our mac-based graphic design company to actually have used linux (it was around that time that i replaced our old mac file server with a linux box, guaranteeing my job security) i threw out the idea of putting the kernel source on the back.
well, needless to say, the people we were working with at redhat loved it (and loved it more after talking to some programmers). so i popped over to kernel.org and popped the concatenated text over to the designer working on the poster. the current source being about 4,000% larger than the original at that time (2.2something), we stuck with the original:)
redhat's legal folks wanted to be sure the source was safe to use and print, since v.01 wasn't covered by GPL. i noted the copyright that said the code was free for use so long as it contained that text. the writer for the report traded emails with alan cox on the subject.
then they wanted me to go through the text and take out the comments.
WTF?
oh no! it has bad words in it! they didn't seem to think there would be anything decipherable in the code, i think. in particular, someone had stumbled on linus' comment about leap years in mktime.c "I also hate Gregorius, pope or no. I'm grumpy." and thought there might be problems with its anti-pope nature.
that and "Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up:-)" in vsprintf.c
in the end, cooler minds (i.e. mine:) prevailed, and we didn't even have to replace fuck with f**k, which was a proposed compromise at one point.
anyhoo, it ended up a cool poster, and i still have a copy hanging in my office at home. from our subsequent work for redhat, i hear that a number of the programmers have copies up in their cubes, too.
i think it's about time for a cable channel that's entirely programmed by the viewers, kinda like a slashdot channel.
yeah, it wouldn't have much original programming, but i imagine it would be the best mix of reruns and syndicated shows available. and with this crowd, a lot of sci-fi and classic thinking-person's shows (ooh! a channel that would show "The Prisoner" would get my vote)
maybe with enough karma-minded contributing viewers, it would have enough clout and advertisers to afford to get some original shows produced...
The phrases "wardriving" and "warchalking" derive from the early days of computer hacking when curious users programmed their computers to search for all phone lines that returned data tones. The exhaustive searching was known as "wardialling".... which is derived from the name of the popular '80s movie "war games" (starring matthew broderick) where the prototypical "hacker" hero uses an automated modem-dialing program to test all possible phone numbers for accessible modem-connected computers. The movie brought into the public eye such programs, which were traded among early "hackers" on BBS and other systems and called "War Dialers."
sorry. i think part of the article was cut off there at the end...
spamnet (see link above) promises to make it so that, if you add a filter to your email, and it (or you) shows promise as a good spam filterer, that filter gets added to those that all subscribers get. unfortunately, it's currently only for outlook, but i expect it will either add support for other clients, or someone will come up with an open source alternative...
i have a screensaver that's learning to walk...
on
A Robot Learns To Fly
·
· Score: 2
i really dig the idea of genetic "learning" simulations. they start with nothing, and eventually can come up with all the same things animals do - including different gaits for walking and running, etc.
this is especially cool, in that they've not only done this in a simulation, but with a real nuts and bolts 'bot. how easy it seems to me now to ship out robots with very little programming, but a quick learning curve. the owner puts the 'bot in its home, punches in a few things it would like the bot to do, and lets it explore a little. after some training, it's perfectly suited to its new job and new environment...
oh yeah. i grabbed a screensaver a while back from this guy that simulates a simple creature learning to walk. pretty spiffy, and you don't have to worry about it ambling off to the parking lot...
this link (which slashdot will probably munge: http://cyberguys.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?UID=2002 080514403159&GEN6=00&GEN9=5CG01&FNM=00&T1=104+1150 &UREQA=1&UREQB=2&UREQC=3&UREQD=4
or else try product # 104 1150 on http://www.cyberguys.com
it's a KVM "extender" that works over cat 5 for 500 feet. i don't know who makes it, but the cyberguys catalog had it. this plus a KVM switch on each end of your setup might be enable you to do what you want...
just as i thought. it seems a little countuerintuitive, but i won't argue with you.
i'll have to pass this on to my mathematician friend, who came to the opposite conclusion. of course, he had a convoluted way of coming to his conclusion. i'll see if i can find the email he sent me...
he and i were never able to come up with a "pattern" to beat A1 (and never really bothered with A2:), despite our best efforts, and we each could only stumble on a solution after some frenzied clicking and much "aggrivation"
as for contacting me, my email is plastered all over the site with the aggrivator on it. or, you could put my slashdot id together with the URL and have a pretty good idea...
while everyone is mentioning go-like and chess-like games of recent invention, i thought i'd throw a plug out there of a game i came up with (though it's similar to several) a couple years ago, called the Aggravator.
of course, i failed to check my spelling at the time, so the game is acually called "aggrivator" which only adds to my aggravation.
i've managed to beat it - once. the rules are fairly simple, but the goal is to get all the squares on the board to look the same, which is fiendishly difficult.
the sequel, aggrivator 2.0 is also online, http://www.niftee-tron.com/shock/aggrivator2.html. i've never beaten it, and i don't know anyone who has. it has several levels, each with their own "goal". i tend to think that some of them are impossible to attain, but a math major friend of mine tells me that, using the progression rules in the game, it's possible to attain any board state, but then, he's just a grad student, so what can he know?
anyhoo, maybe some of the distributed might of the slashdot crowd can solve A2.
I'll bet Dollars to Doughnuts that he gets at least one more bill from one or both of them. sort of a going away present.
AOL used to be notorious, and probably still is among people that still listen to AOL sob stories... anyhow, they used to be notorious for billing people's credit cards after they had decided to use their free 50 hours and then cancel. (it's up to 1000 now, or something like that. ridiculous...) To get your free 50 hours, of course, you have to give AOL your credit card number. when your 30 days are up, even if you've cancelled, they would too frequently charge your credit card.
and sometimes continue to do so for months, despite repeat cancellations. i've heard of this happening a lot. fun, huh?
now they're touting the fact that you don't need a credit card to get online any more. wow. i guess now you have to give them access to your checking account for automatic drafts.
you beat me to my obligate post about the newton, in which i traditionally point out the continuing viability of 5-year old apple technology compared to whatever the latest and greatest handheld happens to be.
i'm considering getting a wavelan card and one of the PCMCIA->compact flash adapters (once all the drivers are out of beta and i can use encryption on my home network), so i can have some more storage space in my 2100. 2 real PC card slots really comes in handy sometimes...
ichat is supposedly being "let under the tent" by aol. according to the coverage on maccentral. i.e. aol is playing nice with apple, since they realize the official AIM client sucks rocks.
it seems to me like i could benefit from carrying rat treats in my pockets, just in case the building collapsed, and my only hope for survival was one of these little buggers. that's right mister rat, ignore the electrode in your pleasure center, i have real food for you.
Slashdot Mirror
i'll buy one. hell, i'll order ten of them for my office...
the day quark xpress 6 comes out.
seriously. the only reason i and a good many other mac IT folks with purchasing power have still got previous generation macs on our desks is that f*ing quark xpress isn't X native yet. the new G4s don't boot in 9, so it's not an option to dual-boot or run 9 and wait to upgrade to X. everybody i've talked to pretty much agrees, apple needs to light a fire under quark. or maybe buy them, since apple seems to have eaten up all the companies that make video editing software to create final cut and dvd studio. maybe an apple iQuark...
anyhoo, the day xpress 6 is available, apple will immediately see a spike in sales of new systems and OS X boxes. i'd be willing to put money on it.
Quark has had 2+ years now to carbonize xpress. i thought adobe was lagging with photoshop being so late to the game, but quark makes them look like early adopters by comparison. and with every day they don't have a carbonized xpress, their market share in the heavy mac-using print graphics world is eroding away, given over in droves to adobe indesign.
probably off-topic, but i felt a rant coming on and this was a target of opportunity.
from the post (not having bothered to read the article, as it seems there's no point...): ...administered over the Ethernet interface or via an insecure (non WEP) wireless connection, an attacker that can sniff the network can obtain administrative access to the AirPort (emphasis mine)
/. section - commonsense.slashdot.org - to address these kinds of posts.
well, big frickin' duh, if you'll pardon my french.
if i administrate any computer or for that matter any access point via an insecure connection or any connection that can be sniffed by an intruder well, no doubt it can be compromised!
why is this news? why, more specifically is this apple news?
why not create a new
i thought this line from the article was a giveaway that it was written by a woman - not a dig in any way, just something to note:
Lizzie McGuire is a live-action Ally McBeal for kids on The Disney Channel and it's a huge hit with girls, and boys oddly enough.
however, it was written by someone named Gerard, which, traditionally, is a male name.
so i have to ask, Gerard, do you remember being a pre-teen/young teenager? we're talking about a show in which the title character, and presumably most of the other main characters, are (A) female, and (B) probably fairly attractive if they're on a TV show, and, if given A and B, probably dressed like little pre-teen whores.
sorry, not whores... too harsh. tramps maybe. sluts. women of negotiable affection.
you know what i mean - all the fashionable girls, and thus their little sisters who don't know any better, are wearing midriff shirts that show their stomachs, lowrider pants that show their asses, and not a lot else. and lots of makeup.
is it any wonder little boys, who very quickly go straight from "girls? yuck!" to "girls? damn!" are tuning in?
offtopic? yes... but one must understand one's target audience...
the descent of american television quality into the realm of craptitude we see today is entirely due to the PTA and the AARP - the two most powerful organizations in the US other than the NRA, mostly because the NRA has guns. some of us in the underground plan to put guns in the hands of teachers and retirees and see what happens next...
since it was long ago discovered that kids that watch too much TV are less intelligent and less respectful of their elders than quiet kids that read books, the PTAARP quetly infiltrated the american television indistry, specifically the animation production companies, planting ever increasingly insipid, politically correct and above all boring show concepts into the project pipelines. high-level PTAARP sympathizers at the networks green-lit these projects, diluting the quality of child-oriented televised animation and quietly killing off the spirit of america's cartoon-watching youth.
not being the brightest of the teachers and retirees out there (that segment of the PTAARP already having been recruited by the government for thought-control experiments and school-lunch programs) the plan actually backfired somewhat. rather than turn off the TV and read books, or go outside and enjoy nature on saturday mornings, america's youth adapted to and came to accept the new, milquetoast offerings. rather than breeding a more intelligent, more fit generation of americans, the program instead has been turning out americans more and more accepting of establishment, and less likely to change their habits to conform with a changing enviroment.
some have said that the program was subverted from within by a splinter group of the Young Republicans to just this end
meanwhile, the writers of decent cartoons have abandoned the youth market and instead targeted adults, to the benefit of the growing adult cartoon market, a short-lived market segment, not only because these are the last generation of adults who grew up with quality youth-oriented cartoons, but also because they still spend their leisure time on a couch watching TV instead of exercizing.
ah! finally we get to see what it was that infocom's Z-Machine was emulating. pretty impressive i'd say. all that to play Zork on...
as for computerized shakespeare, i prefer hamlet. :)
after all, human actors are all so finicky and outdated.
plus, there's nothing quite like hearing zarvox give the pronouncement that "rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead!"
offtopic, yes, but somewhat more in the vein of discussion, how does it do on reflecting, say, radar?
i want to see the CNN footage when the first of these gets used (presuming the cameras are out of the effective range, and thus unharmed).
the lights blink out, cars stop running, and everyone in baghdad with a pacemaker suddenly clutches his chest and falls over.
i need to update that page. i posted it a couple years ago when the company i work for was working on the first redhat annual report - which folds out into a poster with the word "open" across the front. there were some ideas thrown out for what to put on the back of the poster; at the beginning it was just going to be blank to save money, IIRC.
:)
:-)" in vsprintf.c
:) prevailed, and we didn't even have to replace fuck with f**k, which was a proposed compromise at one point.
being the "web guy" and the only person at our mac-based graphic design company to actually have used linux (it was around that time that i replaced our old mac file server with a linux box, guaranteeing my job security) i threw out the idea of putting the kernel source on the back.
well, needless to say, the people we were working with at redhat loved it (and loved it more after talking to some programmers). so i popped over to kernel.org and popped the concatenated text over to the designer working on the poster. the current source being about 4,000% larger than the original at that time (2.2something), we stuck with the original
redhat's legal folks wanted to be sure the source was safe to use and print, since v.01 wasn't covered by GPL. i noted the copyright that said the code was free for use so long as it contained that text. the writer for the report traded emails with alan cox on the subject.
then they wanted me to go through the text and take out the comments.
WTF?
oh no! it has bad words in it! they didn't seem to think there would be anything decipherable in the code, i think. in particular, someone had stumbled on linus' comment about leap years in mktime.c "I also hate Gregorius, pope or no. I'm grumpy." and thought there might be problems with its anti-pope nature.
that and "Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
in the end, cooler minds (i.e. mine
anyhoo, it ended up a cool poster, and i still have a copy hanging in my office at home. from our subsequent work for redhat, i hear that a number of the programmers have copies up in their cubes, too.
you mean this one?
Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
humorous bits of code and comments from linus torvalds' 1991 kernel (version 0.01):
Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
can i mod this story as flamebait?
i think it's about time for a cable channel that's entirely programmed by the viewers, kinda like a slashdot channel.
yeah, it wouldn't have much original programming, but i imagine it would be the best mix of reruns and syndicated shows available. and with this crowd, a lot of sci-fi and classic thinking-person's shows (ooh! a channel that would show "The Prisoner" would get my vote)
maybe with enough karma-minded contributing viewers, it would have enough clout and advertisers to afford to get some original shows produced...
*shrug*
it's an idea. not my best...
The phrases "wardriving" and "warchalking" derive from the early days of computer hacking when curious users programmed their computers to search for all phone lines that returned data tones. The exhaustive searching was known as "wardialling". ... which is derived from the name of the popular '80s movie "war games" (starring matthew broderick) where the prototypical "hacker" hero uses an automated modem-dialing program to test all possible phone numbers for accessible modem-connected computers. The movie brought into the public eye such programs, which were traded among early "hackers" on BBS and other systems and called "War Dialers."
sorry. i think part of the article was cut off there at the end...
it uses bluetooth, and according to the article, the control connection is encrypted, so it shouldn't be "sniff"able.
Make it Distributed and make it work with eudora, and i'll gladly use it.
spamnet (see link above) promises to make it so that, if you add a filter to your email, and it (or you) shows promise as a good spam filterer, that filter gets added to those that all subscribers get. unfortunately, it's currently only for outlook, but i expect it will either add support for other clients, or someone will come up with an open source alternative...
i really dig the idea of genetic "learning" simulations. they start with nothing, and eventually can come up with all the same things animals do - including different gaits for walking and running, etc.
this is especially cool, in that they've not only done this in a simulation, but with a real nuts and bolts 'bot. how easy it seems to me now to ship out robots with very little programming, but a quick learning curve. the owner puts the 'bot in its home, punches in a few things it would like the bot to do, and lets it explore a little. after some training, it's perfectly suited to its new job and new environment...
oh yeah. i grabbed a screensaver a while back from this guy that simulates a simple creature learning to walk. pretty spiffy, and you don't have to worry about it ambling off to the parking lot...
this link (which slashdot will probably munge: http://cyberguys.com/cgi-bin/sgin0101.exe?UID=2002 080514403159&GEN6=00&GEN9=5CG01&FNM=00&T1=104+1150 &UREQA=1&UREQB=2&UREQC=3&UREQD=4
or else try product # 104 1150 on http://www.cyberguys.com
it's a KVM "extender" that works over cat 5 for 500 feet. i don't know who makes it, but the cyberguys catalog had it. this plus a KVM switch on each end of your setup might be enable you to do what you want...
just as i thought. it seems a little countuerintuitive, but i won't argue with you.
:), despite our best efforts, and we each could only stumble on a solution after some frenzied clicking and much "aggrivation"
i'll have to pass this on to my mathematician friend, who came to the opposite conclusion. of course, he had a convoluted way of coming to his conclusion. i'll see if i can find the email he sent me...
he and i were never able to come up with a "pattern" to beat A1 (and never really bothered with A2
as for contacting me, my email is plastered all over the site with the aggrivator on it. or, you could put my slashdot id together with the URL and have a pretty good idea...
while everyone is mentioning go-like and chess-like games of recent invention, i thought i'd throw a plug out there of a game i came up with (though it's similar to several) a couple years ago, called the Aggravator.
. i've never beaten it, and i don't know anyone who has. it has several levels, each with their own "goal". i tend to think that some of them are impossible to attain, but a math major friend of mine tells me that, using the progression rules in the game, it's possible to attain any board state, but then, he's just a grad student, so what can he know?
of course, i failed to check my spelling at the time, so the game is acually called "aggrivator" which only adds to my aggravation.
anyhoo, it's a fun little game on a 5x5 board. you can play it online (requires shockwave plugin) here: http://www.niftee-tron.com/shock/aggrivator.html.
i've managed to beat it - once. the rules are fairly simple, but the goal is to get all the squares on the board to look the same, which is fiendishly difficult.
the sequel, aggrivator 2.0 is also online, http://www.niftee-tron.com/shock/aggrivator2.html
anyhoo, maybe some of the distributed might of the slashdot crowd can solve A2.
so they were going to make a knock off of the 1989 Dolph Lundgren marvel comic adaptation bomb in their apartment?
or a sequel?
maybe if they got louis gosset, jr. to reprise his role...
I'll bet Dollars to Doughnuts that he gets at least one more bill from one or both of them. sort of a going away present.
AOL used to be notorious, and probably still is among people that still listen to AOL sob stories... anyhow, they used to be notorious for billing people's credit cards after they had decided to use their free 50 hours and then cancel. (it's up to 1000 now, or something like that. ridiculous...) To get your free 50 hours, of course, you have to give AOL your credit card number. when your 30 days are up, even if you've cancelled, they would too frequently charge your credit card.
and sometimes continue to do so for months, despite repeat cancellations. i've heard of this happening a lot. fun, huh?
now they're touting the fact that you don't need a credit card to get online any more. wow. i guess now you have to give them access to your checking account for automatic drafts.
*new can opened*
*worms everywhere*
dang...
you beat me to my obligate post about the newton, in which i traditionally point out the continuing viability of 5-year old apple technology compared to whatever the latest and greatest handheld happens to be.
i'm considering getting a wavelan card and one of the PCMCIA->compact flash adapters (once all the drivers are out of beta and i can use encryption on my home network), so i can have some more storage space in my 2100. 2 real PC card slots really comes in handy sometimes...
ichat is supposedly being "let under the tent" by aol. according to the coverage on maccentral. i.e. aol is playing nice with apple, since they realize the official AIM client sucks rocks.
it seems to me like i could benefit from carrying rat treats in my pockets, just in case the building collapsed, and my only hope for survival was one of these little buggers. that's right mister rat, ignore the electrode in your pleasure center, i have real food for you.
"whisker lickins!"