If I am not thinking ahead, it's because I don't see anything appealing about the scenario you apparently expect. Keyboards are great for entering text. We have been refining them for decades. If there were a better way of building a keyboard someone would already have tried it. I do not believe that keyboards are going away, because people will continue to need to enter text, and will continue to need to enter large amounts of text. Anyone whose job involves a lot of text entry is not going to be happy about the idea of using a tablet instead of a normal computer.
As far as attaching an external keyboard, well, if you take a tablet and attach a keyboard, how is that different from having a laptop? If you are regularly using a home-assembled laptop, why wouldn't you just use.... a laptop? Or are you simply suggesting that laptops of the future will have touch-sensitive screens in addition to their keyboards? I can't see the form factor working particularly well, but I suppose it's possible.
The ipad (because that's what we really mean by "tablets" here) is a new kind of computer, but it doesn't replace the existing kind of computer, because it doesn't have a keyboard. Touch is great for certain kinds of things, and keyboards are great for other kinds of things, and it simply doesn't make sense to do anything text-heavy on a touch interface.
Smartphones didn't replace computers. Tablets won't replace smartphones. "Post-PC" doesn't mean the PC is going away; it means the PC is no longer the sole center of the computing universe.
My friend "admitted" his actions to the person in the store because he was hoping to spread the idea and encourage others to participate.
Red light cameras are a racket. Private companies install and operate them in exchange for a per-ticket fee. The city government gets money, the private company gets money, and we the citizens get screwed. The "public safety" angle is nothing more than a cover story - as we have seen many cities end up adjusting the length of the yellow light downward in order to increase revenue generated by the camera. This practice actually makes those intersections less safe. Furthermore, people are more likely to panic-stop at intersections with red-light cameras, making rear-end collisions more likely.
My friend believes that this situation is illegitimate and unfair. He further believes that the democratic process will accomplish nothing, because it's too small an issue to get people excited about, but too profitable an issue for the city government to yield without a great deal of pressure.
My friend chose his "vandalism" strategy carefully: he is not trying to destroy or even damage someone else's property, but merely to force the private company running the camera to spend more money maintaining their equipment, thereby making their operation less profitable. The glue is water-soluble and does no permanent damage to the camera. A worker can clean the glue off in a minute with nothing more than a wet rag, and the camera works just as well as it did before. But as often as my friend goes by and glues up the camera, the company has to send someone out to clean it, and that costs them money. If enough people keep costing the red-light company money, the venture will stop being profitable, and then we can use the normal political process to get rid of the cameras.
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
All I know about the name "Fraunhofer" is that they are the assholes with the MP3 patents who tried to shut down all the open-source players and force the commercial ones to pay ransom. Learning that the "BerliOS" project is associated with them makes me less sympathetic, not more.
Re:Not really a virus, or at least not effective.
on
PC Virus Turns 25
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· Score: 2
This is a somewhat different definition of "virus" than I remember from the '80s. I haven't actually encountered a virus since then, so perhaps usage has changed, but back in the day a "virus" was a self-replicating program that worked by attaching itself to or embedding itself within an existing program, while a "worm" was a stand-alone program that worked by exploiting security holes in remote computers and copying itself over independently.
Evading detection is a secondary effect of the fact that the virus works by embedding itself within an existing program; it takes advantage of some existing process to replicate itself. Of course evading detection is a good thing if you want your virus to succeed, but a self-replicating program does not fail to earn the label "virus" simply because its author took no special care to disguise it.
Google's ecosystem is very strongly tied together. You might not notice this if you are already using GMail, but all their other tools depend on it. It is difficult to use any of Google's stuff without somehow getting roped into GMail.
Googletalk, for example, used to be, or at least look like, a stand-alone chat service; I signed up for a googletalk account and used it to chat for a while. Then I noticed that quite a few of my friends were having trouble getting email through to me - they kept referring to things they'd sent me which I'd never received. Huh?
It turned out that there is no such thing as a "googletalk account" - it's just a gmail account. Since I have never used gmail, I had no idea there was an email address associated with this thing. But any gmail user who chatted with me would find my googletalk address added to their address book - and would try sending email to it!
The same thing seems to happen with google groups, google wave, all these things. I have not been able to find any coherent explanation of which login systems will automatically create a google mail account and which ones won't. I get the impression that Google engineers tend to think of their new services as extensions to gmail, and don't really consider that people might not want to use gmail.
on an off-topic note: why do we now call compilers "linkers" and use the word "compiler" to refer to code converters? That's just dumb. I used to think it was only tech-illiterates that used it that way around, but it's slipped into normal usage.
As long as I have been paying attention to computers, which is about twenty years now, "compiler" has referred to a program that converts source code from a higher- to a lower-level language, and "linker" has referred to a program which stitches bits of object code together into an executable file. I suppose it's possible that you are a genuine old-timer, and that your recollection of the word's meaning predates mine *and* that of anyone who has ever bothered to write any of the computer-terms dictionaries I know about, but I think it more likely that you simply misunderstand the origins of the term.
Yes, the plain-English definition of the verb "to compile" does sound more like what a linker does than what a modern compiler does, but that wasn't always the case. The original, 1950s-era notion of a compiler was more like what we would think of as a macro expander. The idea was that programmers would type statements representing higher-level actions, that each of these actions would represent some block of machine instructions, and that the "compiler" would create a program by slapping all these prefabbed bits of machine instructions together in order. It thus "compiled" a program out of fragments, much as someone would (for example) compile a dictionary out of individual definitions.
Across half a century's distance, of course, things change. The technical term "compiler" began referring to the job that the program did, not the mechanism used to perform it. The programs that do that job are now vastly more complex than they once were, and it's hard to find any resemblance in their mechanism to the English-language notion of "compilation", but we still call them "compilers" because that's what we have always called programs that do that job.
In any case, the definition of "compiler" as a program that converts from one language to another is most certainly the standard and accepted one. I work on development tools for a living, and when I am discussing programs that translate code with my colleagues, or reading about them in books or articles, "compiler" is always the term used, and this is not a recent development.
Oh - wait - "tries to can sex spam"... suddenly the name of that law makes more sense. I had been reading "can spam" as, "you can spam and nobody can sue you as long as you follow these rules"; it never occured to me that they might have intended "can" to be a verb. I was really surprised that Congress was being so straightforward about their intentions with that law, given that cutesy acronyms for law names are usually feel-good propaganda that mean something completely opposite of whatever the law actually does. I guess they outsmarted themselves with that acronym, since it works in both directions...
I've used the PC Card slot in every PowerBook I've ever owned. Back in the '90s, I travelled a lot and used the slot for a modem. I haven't used a modem in years, but I've had a memory card reader in the slot since I bought my first digital camera in 2001. Why "limit" myself? Because dongles suck and I hate carrying them around. Anyway, both of my machines are laptops and have PC Card slots.
Oh well - needs differ.
-Mars
Re:Dispelling the Myth of Wireless Security
on
Wireless Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hacked? I left mine open on purpose. I'm not using most of the bandwidth anyway, so why keep it locked up?
I saw this robot in action Tuesday evening at the opening of the Dorkbot show at COCA here in Seattle. Only it wasn't running around looking for open access points, it was out in front of the DJ stage *dancing*. Someone had brought their daughter, who looked to be about four, and for a few minutes the kid and the wheely-bot were dancing. Quite a scene, though I didn't have my camera handy.
Who knows what the future will bring - but we already have a PowerPC backend, so it's not unreasonable to think linuxppc support might show up in another release or two.
There is one hell of a lot of absolutely nothing between the Sierra Nevada and the Great Plains, including long stretches with dozens of miles between buildings. Even if this effort could get access points set up at every building with a power outlet, it'd still be difficult.
I wish this project well, and I think an open network of access points routing packets to one another is a far better vision of what the Internet could be than the backbone-oriented system we have today... but I am not at all hopeful that they will pull this off.
It wasn't until 10.2 that Apple finally standardized switching between open windows of an application with Option-~.
I'm pissed off about this one; it's one of the reasons I still do all my work in OS 9 and only reboot into OS X to make sure I haven't broken anything. CodeWarrior uses Command-tilde to switch between a source file and its corresponding header file; I use this about a hundred times a day, almost as often as command-apostrophe to look up a symbol. But of course Jaguar's use of the command key overrides CodeWarrior's, for a function it had never occured to me to want, and which I have never used (at least not on purpose).
Add another to the list of ways MacOS X makes me feel like a foreigner in what is supposed to be the same operating system I have been using for the past 18 years. Grrr.
Eventually, the programmer will/might realize that he could have written the same program for Windows, and have made himself a living writing programs (outside of the rat race, might I add)
Perhaps; but having taken a turn through the shareware world many years ago, and even launched an ill-fated software startup, I can safely say that it's far more fun giving stuff away. When you sell code, you have to meet deadlines, fix bugs, manage billing, and support users. Good God, is that ever a pain. No thanks. So this programmer eventually realized that he could have written the same program for free, had more fun at it, and earned some good-karma points by giving away the source code too.
At that point, the product will be left hanging.
Or someone else will pick it up and continue working on it. Or the people who use the product will hire someone to work on it. Or they'll switch to whatever new package has come along and made the original one irrelevant. Or it won't matter that it's been left hanging, because it was finished anyway, and it will just continue to do its job indefinitely.
Yes, you generate thrust by throwing matter out the back, but you need some energy source to do the throwing. You accomplish this by heating the fuel rapidly; it becomes a gas and expands, creating pressure in the combustion chamber, which exerts pressure on the vehicle as it exits the exhaust nozzle.
"Chemical" engines get their heat from chemical reactions; "nuclear" engines from nuclear reactions. The Space Shuttle burns hydrogen and oxygen, and the released chemical potential energy turns into heat. A NERVA-style engine allows atoms to break down; the resulting energy is applied to liquid hydrogen, which rapidly becomes a gas and ejects itself out the nozzle.
I'm asking you, since you seem to care about it, but it's not the first time I've wondered. Why is "tabbed browsing" considered a standard feature all of a sudden? I tried it when I first downloaded Mozilla, but didn't see the point. Is it really that big a deal to replace a stack of windows with a stack of tabs?
Well, that's their point of view, but just because you can understand someone's point of view doesn't mean you have to excuse it. Christians can think whatever they want; I think they have no place meddling about in other people's business and ought to leave well enough alone. Of course I understand why they do it: but it's still obnoxious and unhelpful. Why should the rest of us care what Christians think about their mythical "heaven" and "hell"? That's their problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If I am not thinking ahead, it's because I don't see anything appealing about the scenario you apparently expect. Keyboards are great for entering text. We have been refining them for decades. If there were a better way of building a keyboard someone would already have tried it. I do not believe that keyboards are going away, because people will continue to need to enter text, and will continue to need to enter large amounts of text. Anyone whose job involves a lot of text entry is not going to be happy about the idea of using a tablet instead of a normal computer.
As far as attaching an external keyboard, well, if you take a tablet and attach a keyboard, how is that different from having a laptop? If you are regularly using a home-assembled laptop, why wouldn't you just use.... a laptop? Or are you simply suggesting that laptops of the future will have touch-sensitive screens in addition to their keyboards? I can't see the form factor working particularly well, but I suppose it's possible.
The ipad (because that's what we really mean by "tablets" here) is a new kind of computer, but it doesn't replace the existing kind of computer, because it doesn't have a keyboard. Touch is great for certain kinds of things, and keyboards are great for other kinds of things, and it simply doesn't make sense to do anything text-heavy on a touch interface.
Smartphones didn't replace computers. Tablets won't replace smartphones. "Post-PC" doesn't mean the PC is going away; it means the PC is no longer the sole center of the computing universe.
My friend "admitted" his actions to the person in the store because he was hoping to spread the idea and encourage others to participate.
Red light cameras are a racket. Private companies install and operate them in exchange for a per-ticket fee. The city government gets money, the private company gets money, and we the citizens get screwed. The "public safety" angle is nothing more than a cover story - as we have seen many cities end up adjusting the length of the yellow light downward in order to increase revenue generated by the camera. This practice actually makes those intersections less safe. Furthermore, people are more likely to panic-stop at intersections with red-light cameras, making rear-end collisions more likely.
My friend believes that this situation is illegitimate and unfair. He further believes that the democratic process will accomplish nothing, because it's too small an issue to get people excited about, but too profitable an issue for the city government to yield without a great deal of pressure.
My friend chose his "vandalism" strategy carefully: he is not trying to destroy or even damage someone else's property, but merely to force the private company running the camera to spend more money maintaining their equipment, thereby making their operation less profitable. The glue is water-soluble and does no permanent damage to the camera. A worker can clean the glue off in a minute with nothing more than a wet rag, and the camera works just as well as it did before. But as often as my friend goes by and glues up the camera, the company has to send someone out to clean it, and that costs them money. If enough people keep costing the red-light company money, the venture will stop being profitable, and then we can use the normal political process to get rid of the cameras.
A friend of mine discovered that it is trivially easy to blind one of these cameras.
From his local grocery store, he bought an empty sprayer bottle and some white glue (like Elmer's); this cost like three bucks. He mixed up a 1:1 solution of glue and water, then screwed his sprayer bottle's nozzle to the "stream" mode.
My friend started carrying one of those reusable grocery bags to the store. He'd just leave the sprayer bottle in it. Every time he went to the store, he'd walk up behind the red-light camera, stand just underneath it but still outside its field of vision, and then spray glue all over the lens.
Note that the red light camera systems usually have two cameras: one is a video camera, mounted higher up, which does detection; the lower camera is a high-res still camera, designed to capture the image of the license plate. You don't need to bother with the video camera; just blind the still camera. The system will still keep running, but the photos will be all blurred out and unusable.
My friend said that he'd walk by the camera two or three times a week, and the lens was usually cleaned off by the time he came back. That means that the red-light camera company was sending someone out to clean it, over and over, every week, costing the company lots of money.
My friend told me that someone once approached him in the grocery store and asked what he had been doing; they'd seen him spraying the camera and were curious what he was up to. When he explained how easy it was to disable a red-light camera, the person was delighted and decided to go start doing it herself, too.
That's great for all fifty people who use Powershell.
All I know about the name "Fraunhofer" is that they are the assholes with the MP3 patents who tried to shut down all the open-source players and force the commercial ones to pay ransom. Learning that the "BerliOS" project is associated with them makes me less sympathetic, not more.
A friend of mine used to mix a 50% solution of elmer's glue and water in a spray bottle for a similar effect.
Thanks for all the work, Rob.
This is a somewhat different definition of "virus" than I remember from the '80s. I haven't actually encountered a virus since then, so perhaps usage has changed, but back in the day a "virus" was a self-replicating program that worked by attaching itself to or embedding itself within an existing program, while a "worm" was a stand-alone program that worked by exploiting security holes in remote computers and copying itself over independently.
Evading detection is a secondary effect of the fact that the virus works by embedding itself within an existing program; it takes advantage of some existing process to replicate itself. Of course evading detection is a good thing if you want your virus to succeed, but a self-replicating program does not fail to earn the label "virus" simply because its author took no special care to disguise it.
Google's ecosystem is very strongly tied together. You might not notice this if you are already using GMail, but all their other tools depend on it. It is difficult to use any of Google's stuff without somehow getting roped into GMail.
Googletalk, for example, used to be, or at least look like, a stand-alone chat service; I signed up for a googletalk account and used it to chat for a while. Then I noticed that quite a few of my friends were having trouble getting email through to me - they kept referring to things they'd sent me which I'd never received. Huh?
It turned out that there is no such thing as a "googletalk account" - it's just a gmail account. Since I have never used gmail, I had no idea there was an email address associated with this thing. But any gmail user who chatted with me would find my googletalk address added to their address book - and would try sending email to it!
The same thing seems to happen with google groups, google wave, all these things. I have not been able to find any coherent explanation of which login systems will automatically create a google mail account and which ones won't. I get the impression that Google engineers tend to think of their new services as extensions to gmail, and don't really consider that people might not want to use gmail.
This is a good idea unless you want your access point open.
Which I do, and have, since 2001. Costs me nothing, harms my security not at all, and makes life a little easier for my neighbors; what's not to like?
on an off-topic note: why do we now call compilers "linkers" and use the word "compiler" to refer to code converters? That's just dumb. I used to think it was only tech-illiterates that used it that way around, but it's slipped into normal usage.
As long as I have been paying attention to computers, which is about twenty years now, "compiler" has referred to a program that converts source code from a higher- to a lower-level language, and "linker" has referred to a program which stitches bits of object code together into an executable file. I suppose it's possible that you are a genuine old-timer, and that your recollection of the word's meaning predates mine *and* that of anyone who has ever bothered to write any of the computer-terms dictionaries I know about, but I think it more likely that you simply misunderstand the origins of the term.
Yes, the plain-English definition of the verb "to compile" does sound more like what a linker does than what a modern compiler does, but that wasn't always the case. The original, 1950s-era notion of a compiler was more like what we would think of as a macro expander. The idea was that programmers would type statements representing higher-level actions, that each of these actions would represent some block of machine instructions, and that the "compiler" would create a program by slapping all these prefabbed bits of machine instructions together in order. It thus "compiled" a program out of fragments, much as someone would (for example) compile a dictionary out of individual definitions.
Across half a century's distance, of course, things change. The technical term "compiler" began referring to the job that the program did, not the mechanism used to perform it. The programs that do that job are now vastly more complex than they once were, and it's hard to find any resemblance in their mechanism to the English-language notion of "compilation", but we still call them "compilers" because that's what we have always called programs that do that job.
In any case, the definition of "compiler" as a program that converts from one language to another is most certainly the standard and accepted one. I work on development tools for a living, and when I am discussing programs that translate code with my colleagues, or reading about them in books or articles, "compiler" is always the term used, and this is not a recent development.
Oh - wait - "tries to can sex spam"... suddenly the name of that law makes more sense. I had been reading "can spam" as, "you can spam and nobody can sue you as long as you follow these rules"; it never occured to me that they might have intended "can" to be a verb. I was really surprised that Congress was being so straightforward about their intentions with that law, given that cutesy acronyms for law names are usually feel-good propaganda that mean something completely opposite of whatever the law actually does. I guess they outsmarted themselves with that acronym, since it works in both directions...
My SSID is "mars network, open for all". I have more bandwidth than I can use; why not share it?
I've used the PC Card slot in every PowerBook I've ever owned. Back in the '90s, I travelled a lot and used the slot for a modem. I haven't used a modem in years, but I've had a memory card reader in the slot since I bought my first digital camera in 2001. Why "limit" myself? Because dongles suck and I hate carrying them around. Anyway, both of my machines are laptops and have PC Card slots.
Oh well - needs differ.
-Mars
Hacked? I left mine open on purpose. I'm not using most of the bandwidth anyway, so why keep it locked up?
-Mars
I saw this robot in action Tuesday evening at the opening of the Dorkbot show at COCA here in Seattle. Only it wasn't running around looking for open access points, it was out in front of the DJ stage *dancing*. Someone had brought their daughter, who looked to be about four, and for a few minutes the kid and the wheely-bot were dancing. Quite a scene, though I didn't have my camera handy.
-Mars
Initial release will be ia32 only.
Who knows what the future will bring - but we already have a PowerPC backend, so it's not unreasonable to think linuxppc support might show up in another release or two.
Mars Saxman
compiler guy at Real Software
There is one hell of a lot of absolutely nothing between the Sierra Nevada and the Great Plains, including long stretches with dozens of miles between buildings. Even if this effort could get access points set up at every building with a power outlet, it'd still be difficult.
I wish this project well, and I think an open network of access points routing packets to one another is a far better vision of what the Internet could be than the backbone-oriented system we have today... but I am not at all hopeful that they will pull this off.
-Mars
Apps won't have to be ported, or even recompiled. The architecture doesn't work that way.
It wasn't until 10.2 that Apple finally standardized switching between open windows of an application with Option-~.
I'm pissed off about this one; it's one of the reasons I still do all my work in OS 9 and only reboot into OS X to make sure I haven't broken anything. CodeWarrior uses Command-tilde to switch between a source file and its corresponding header file; I use this about a hundred times a day, almost as often as command-apostrophe to look up a symbol. But of course Jaguar's use of the command key overrides CodeWarrior's, for a function it had never occured to me to want, and which I have never used (at least not on purpose).
Add another to the list of ways MacOS X makes me feel like a foreigner in what is supposed to be the same operating system I have been using for the past 18 years. Grrr.
-Mars
Eventually, the programmer will/might realize that he could have written the same program for Windows, and have made himself a living writing programs (outside of the rat race, might I add)
Perhaps; but having taken a turn through the shareware world many years ago, and even launched an ill-fated software startup, I can safely say that it's far more fun giving stuff away. When you sell code, you have to meet deadlines, fix bugs, manage billing, and support users. Good God, is that ever a pain. No thanks. So this programmer eventually realized that he could have written the same program for free, had more fun at it, and earned some good-karma points by giving away the source code too.
At that point, the product will be left hanging.
Or someone else will pick it up and continue working on it. Or the people who use the product will hire someone to work on it. Or they'll switch to whatever new package has come along and made the original one irrelevant. Or it won't matter that it's been left hanging, because it was finished anyway, and it will just continue to do its job indefinitely.
-Mars
Yes, you generate thrust by throwing matter out the back, but you need some energy source to do the throwing. You accomplish this by heating the fuel rapidly; it becomes a gas and expands, creating pressure in the combustion chamber, which exerts pressure on the vehicle as it exits the exhaust nozzle.
"Chemical" engines get their heat from chemical reactions; "nuclear" engines from nuclear reactions. The Space Shuttle burns hydrogen and oxygen, and the released chemical potential energy turns into heat. A NERVA-style engine allows atoms to break down; the resulting energy is applied to liquid hydrogen, which rapidly becomes a gas and ejects itself out the nozzle.
-Mars
I'm asking you, since you seem to care about it, but it's not the first time I've wondered. Why is "tabbed browsing" considered a standard feature all of a sudden? I tried it when I first downloaded Mozilla, but didn't see the point. Is it really that big a deal to replace a stack of windows with a stack of tabs?
-Mars
Well, that's their point of view, but just because you can understand someone's point of view doesn't mean you have to excuse it. Christians can think whatever they want; I think they have no place meddling about in other people's business and ought to leave well enough alone. Of course I understand why they do it: but it's still obnoxious and unhelpful. Why should the rest of us care what Christians think about their mythical "heaven" and "hell"? That's their problem.
-Mars