I remember installing a copy of slashcode on a Pentium III running Red Hat 6.2 around 11 years ago this summer to run my school labs' bbs system. Somehow I managed to remain sane during that time and I have convinced myself that I am a better programmer and developer for having survived that onslaught of twitchy perl and bash scripts. Thanks Rob teaching me about the virtues of patience in programming and especially when reading other people's code, for slashcode, and especially for slashdot. So long and thanks for all the ponies.
It's nice to see all of this recent publicity for Michael, he's had it pretty rough for the last decade or so. Hopefully he'll be able to capitalize on all of this newfound attention and turn the corner on his financial woes given this huge surge in popularity.
"Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable."
[jay@gobstopper ~]% date Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:32:18 EST
...... Okay guys, looks like this math checks out. It seems that releasing Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 in 2009 is an unobtainable goal at this point in time. You know, in 2010.
Personally I'd be more interested in some decent developer tools. Specifically things like a JavaScript profiler and debugger. I know there are a few third party tools that kinda-sorta do this, but frankly they're all pretty horrible, at least compared to their Firefox equivalents. Give me Firebug and Venkman for IE and I'll be happy.
One incredibly nerdish thing that always bugs me about Tatooine... how come you never see two shadows being cast on anything? Two suns == two shadows, right? I don't think that's ever been addressed in any of the re-releases.
Whatever, none of the "improvements" have done it for me anyways. In my day, Han shot first. And we liked it that way.
That's Todd McFarlane, of Spawn and Spiderman comics fame. Seth MacFarlane is the Family Guy/American Dad dude.
That definitely would have made for quite a different video.
J
Works for Google?
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If this guy does indeed work for Google, perhaps he could take a crack at fixing the problems he sees in the gmail source. As I understand it, everyone in Google gets access to all of their source code and can hack away at stuff even if they're not directly involved in the project. It would be pretty awesome if he could fix some of the problems (several of which I agree with) and present them as fixes to the people in Google that run gmail.
The timeline is in flash, sorry for that, but I'll quote the best bit:
"Two young men, with dreams of bringing computers to life, develop a software application that makes the power of the PC useful and accessible for everyone. Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."
"First programming language"? Right. That's some inventive revisionist history they have going on there.
There was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
I've also noticed that on Mozilla/gecko based browsers, sending the Content-Type as application/xhtml+xml for the main page causes things to break. (Firefox 1.0PR and Mozilla 1.7.2 specifically.) I'm also sending out the CSS as text/css and the JavaScript as text/javascript, so I guess there's a problem some place in gecko, although I'm not sure what.
Sending out the aforementioned Content-Type headers with Opera and IE seem to work, though. Whether or not they do anything with those headers is another thing -- gecko definitely goes into Standards Compliance Mode, though.
All the same, this is some very nice work. Certainly shows how powerful a bit of xhtml, css and js can get.
If it's of any help, I tried all of the examples in both Konqueror from KDE 3.3.1 and the latest Safari, and none of them caused either of the browsers to crash. (konq and safari both use KHTML, of course...)
Elliptic curve cryptography is a public/private key system like DSA or RSA. It's an asymmetric cipher method where the key used to encrypt is not the necessarily the same key used to decrypt.
DES and AES are symmetric ciphers, where you use the same key for both operations.
The two forms of crypto have different uses, and ECC isn't all that useful as a replacement for DES. That's what AES is for.
As an aside, Diffie-Hellman is a method of key agreement, and is not a cipher in itself, but rather it is used in conjunction with other crypto systems. (IPsec, for instance, uses DH, I believe.)
this brings to mind a story my shop teacher told in class in grade 8 or so. he wasn't a fan of abstract art at the time (preferring more concrete art, i suppose), so to prove a point, he decided to submit a piece of his own "art" to a local gallery to see what would happen.
so he went out to his workshed and took out his very old, battered, stained and paint-covered work table. from all outward appearances, the thing was pretty much just a random mess of nicks from saw blades, holes from misjudged nails and paint splashes from stubborn paint cans.
using the work table for a final project, he built a frame, then took the work table apart. the top of the table went into the frame, and the whole thing was submitted to the local art gallery, where it was quite well received by the public. at some point, the work was judged by some high-brow art critics, took second place in overall judging and the artist was offered a rather substantial price for what was originally a common work table.
deciding that enough is enough, the artist revealed that these art critics and abstract art itself was full of it, and that they were all going ga-ga over an old work table. as it turns out, they didn't even really care. how the piece came into existence didn't matter as much as the final result. even better, the piece now had a backstory to it to explain how it became what it became. (some would say this would probably qualify as "found art" anyway.)
in the end, the teacher declined to sell, took his art home, removed the frame and reassembled his work bench. apparently he still has it today.
this might just be a talltale that the teacher told to entertain the class, i have no idea. at the very least, it kept us entertained for a while in between rounds of "throwing wood at each other" and "running with saws".
it does kind of suggest that art is in the eye of the beholder, though, and not necessarily the artist, doesn't it?
(Cut to CBC, Christian Broadcsting Channel, Pat Robertson's channel. On TV. The logo appears on the screen. Pat Robertson and Susan are sitting together.)
Pat Robertson: You know, Susan, there, there's so many great... missionaries doing work... out there in the, in the, in parts of Africa and, and while we're trying to get Bibles to people all over the world, and what we need is the help of everyone out there so that we can continue these, these projects! (Subtitle: "To Pledge Call: I-800-555-2717") Now, listen to this, Susan! (Shows Sister Hollis on screen with some Ethiopians.) one of our missionaries in North Africa has made an amazing discovery! (Shows the green planet of Marklar.) A-a-a new planet in the, in the galaxy Alpha-Seti 6 that has intelligent life on it!
Susan: Amazing!
Pat Robertson: Now, we're not sure what these hyper-intelligent beings look like, but one thing is for sure, they've never heard... of Jesus Christ!
Susan: What can we do with the 600 club to help those poor aliens?!
Pat Robertson: W-what we need, Susan, is we need money to build an Interstellar Cruiser! (shows one on the screen.) Now, this spaceship will be able to travel through a worm hole and deliver the message and glory of Jesus Christ to those godless aliens! Send your money now! Amen!
coincidentally enough, this episode was on the night before last... the episode itself features Sally Struthers in the role of Jabba the Hutt and Starvin' Marvin acquiring an alien ship... pretty good episode.
Another open source crypto package (actually, it's public domain code) that has received FIPS 140-2 certification is crypto++, a set of C++ crypto classes and such.
It should be noted that if (or rather, when) OpenSSL is FIPS 140-2 certified, it doesn't mean that you can use OpenSSL and claim that your code is FIPS 140-2 certified. Technically, you can't even recompile OpenSSL yourself and claim certification on the resulting binaries, you need to go through the certification process again.
Even still, this is definitely nice to see. Congrats to the OpenSSL team.
fwiw, postgres as of version 7.4 has schema support. i haven't had a chance to use it yet as we've previously been using 7.3.x, but it looks pretty good.
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it. Homer: Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me. Moe: All right, it's closing time. Who's paying the tab? Homer: [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am. Hawking: I didn't say that. Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did. [the glove comes out again, bopping Homer in the face] Homer: [still imitating] D'oh.
The original company still owns the copyright, and the source code was technically stolen and never meant to be open source in the first place. So I'm assuming that the company that owns that copyright can do pretty much whatever they want with it, modifications and all.
It pretty much goes without saying, but IANAL, so I could be totally wrong here. Someone with more legal knowledge want to clear things up a bit?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember installing a copy of slashcode on a Pentium III running Red Hat 6.2 around 11 years ago this summer to run my school labs' bbs system. Somehow I managed to remain sane during that time and I have convinced myself that I am a better programmer and developer for having survived that onslaught of twitchy perl and bash scripts. Thanks Rob teaching me about the virtues of patience in programming and especially when reading other people's code, for slashcode, and especially for slashdot. So long and thanks for all the ponies.
It's nice to see all of this recent publicity for Michael, he's had it pretty rough for the last decade or so. Hopefully he'll be able to capitalize on all of this newfound attention and turn the corner on his financial woes given this huge surge in popularity.
What's that you say? Oh. Sorry to hear that.
Hmmm I wonder if this Dr. Robert Smith fellow has... The Cure... to such problems...?
"Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable."
[jay@gobstopper ~]% date
Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:32:18 EST
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=internet+memes
Pay attention to the column headings, especially "Captain".
Personally I'd be more interested in some decent developer tools. Specifically things like a JavaScript profiler and debugger. I know there are a few third party tools that kinda-sorta do this, but frankly they're all pretty horrible, at least compared to their Firefox equivalents. Give me Firebug and Venkman for IE and I'll be happy.
One incredibly nerdish thing that always bugs me about Tatooine... how come you never see two shadows being cast on anything? Two suns == two shadows, right? I don't think that's ever been addressed in any of the re-releases.
Whatever, none of the "improvements" have done it for me anyways. In my day, Han shot first. And we liked it that way.
J
That's Todd McFarlane, of Spawn and Spiderman comics fame. Seth MacFarlane is the Family Guy/American Dad dude.
That definitely would have made for quite a different video.
J
If this guy does indeed work for Google, perhaps he could take a crack at fixing the problems he sees in the gmail source. As I understand it, everyone in Google gets access to all of their source code and can hack away at stuff even if they're not directly involved in the project. It would be pretty awesome if he could fix some of the problems (several of which I agree with) and present them as fixes to the people in Google that run gmail.
J
KDE never used BK. That was an April Fool's joke. Apparently they are switching from CVS to Subversion, though.
J
http://www.microsoft.com/museum/mustimeline.mspx#
The timeline is in flash, sorry for that, but I'll quote the best bit:
"Two young men, with dreams of bringing computers to life, develop a software application that makes the power of the PC useful and accessible for everyone. Using the Altair 8800, Bill Gates and Paul Allen develop the first programming language, and begin an extraordinary, history-making journey."
"First programming language"? Right. That's some inventive revisionist history they have going on there.
J
There was no alien. The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.
Nothing to see here, move along folks.
J
I've also noticed that on Mozilla/gecko based browsers, sending the Content-Type as application/xhtml+xml for the main page causes things to break. (Firefox 1.0PR and Mozilla 1.7.2 specifically.) I'm also sending out the CSS as text/css and the JavaScript as text/javascript, so I guess there's a problem some place in gecko, although I'm not sure what.
Sending out the aforementioned Content-Type headers with Opera and IE seem to work, though. Whether or not they do anything with those headers is another thing -- gecko definitely goes into Standards Compliance Mode, though.
All the same, this is some very nice work. Certainly shows how powerful a bit of xhtml, css and js can get.
J
Just don't observe the election, or you'll change the results!
J
If it's of any help, I tried all of the examples in both Konqueror from KDE 3.3.1 and the latest Safari, and none of them caused either of the browsers to crash. (konq and safari both use KHTML, of course...)
J
Actually, in the new version of Ep 4, Alderaan shoots first. The Death Star was just acting in self defense as Lucas originally intended.
J
Elliptic curve cryptography is a public/private key system like DSA or RSA. It's an asymmetric cipher method where the key used to encrypt is not the necessarily the same key used to decrypt.
DES and AES are symmetric ciphers, where you use the same key for both operations.
The two forms of crypto have different uses, and ECC isn't all that useful as a replacement for DES. That's what AES is for.
As an aside, Diffie-Hellman is a method of key agreement, and is not a cipher in itself, but rather it is used in conjunction with other crypto systems. (IPsec, for instance, uses DH, I believe.)
J
this brings to mind a story my shop teacher told in class in grade 8 or so. he wasn't a fan of abstract art at the time (preferring more concrete art, i suppose), so to prove a point, he decided to submit a piece of his own "art" to a local gallery to see what would happen.
so he went out to his workshed and took out his very old, battered, stained and paint-covered work table. from all outward appearances, the thing was pretty much just a random mess of nicks from saw blades, holes from misjudged nails and paint splashes from stubborn paint cans.
using the work table for a final project, he built a frame, then took the work table apart. the top of the table went into the frame, and the whole thing was submitted to the local art gallery, where it was quite well received by the public. at some point, the work was judged by some high-brow art critics, took second place in overall judging and the artist was offered a rather substantial price for what was originally a common work table.
deciding that enough is enough, the artist revealed that these art critics and abstract art itself was full of it, and that they were all going ga-ga over an old work table. as it turns out, they didn't even really care. how the piece came into existence didn't matter as much as the final result. even better, the piece now had a backstory to it to explain how it became what it became. (some would say this would probably qualify as "found art" anyway.)
in the end, the teacher declined to sell, took his art home, removed the frame and reassembled his work bench. apparently he still has it today.
this might just be a talltale that the teacher told to entertain the class, i have no idea. at the very least, it kept us entertained for a while in between rounds of "throwing wood at each other" and "running with saws".
it does kind of suggest that art is in the eye of the beholder, though, and not necessarily the artist, doesn't it?
J
... found here...
(Cut to CBC, Christian Broadcsting Channel, Pat Robertson's channel. On TV. The logo appears on the screen. Pat Robertson and Susan are sitting together.)
Pat Robertson: You know, Susan, there, there's so many great... missionaries doing work... out there in the, in the, in parts of Africa and, and while we're trying to get Bibles to people all over the world, and what we need is the help of everyone out there so that we can continue these, these projects! (Subtitle: "To Pledge Call: I-800-555-2717") Now, listen to this, Susan! (Shows Sister Hollis on screen with some Ethiopians.) one of our missionaries in North Africa has made an amazing discovery! (Shows the green planet of Marklar.) A-a-a new planet in the, in the galaxy Alpha-Seti 6 that has intelligent life on it!
Susan: Amazing!
Pat Robertson: Now, we're not sure what these hyper-intelligent beings look like, but one thing is for sure, they've never heard... of Jesus Christ!
Susan: What can we do with the 600 club to help those poor aliens?!
Pat Robertson: W-what we need, Susan, is we need money to build an Interstellar Cruiser! (shows one on the screen.) Now, this spaceship will be able to travel through a worm hole and deliver the message and glory of Jesus Christ to those godless aliens! Send your money now! Amen!
coincidentally enough, this episode was on the night before last... the episode itself features Sally Struthers in the role of Jabba the Hutt and Starvin' Marvin acquiring an alien ship... pretty good episode.
J
Another open source crypto package (actually, it's public domain code) that has received FIPS 140-2 certification is crypto++, a set of C++ crypto classes and such.
It should be noted that if (or rather, when) OpenSSL is FIPS 140-2 certified, it doesn't mean that you can use OpenSSL and claim that your code is FIPS 140-2 certified. Technically, you can't even recompile OpenSSL yourself and claim certification on the resulting binaries, you need to go through the certification process again.
Even still, this is definitely nice to see. Congrats to the OpenSSL team.
J
fwiw, postgres as of version 7.4 has schema support. i haven't had a chance to use it yet as we've previously been using 7.3.x, but it looks pretty good.
J
... if you want to generate hype, it's all about games, games, games...
you're half right, but it's really all about developers, developers, developers, developers...
J
that theory has stephen hawking's vote...
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me.
Moe: All right, it's closing time. Who's paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn't say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did. [the glove comes out again, bopping Homer in the face]
Homer: [still imitating] D'oh.
(courtesy snpp.com)
J
The original company still owns the copyright, and the source code was technically stolen and never meant to be open source in the first place. So I'm assuming that the company that owns that copyright can do pretty much whatever they want with it, modifications and all.
It pretty much goes without saying, but IANAL, so I could be totally wrong here. Someone with more legal knowledge want to clear things up a bit?
J
I don't know why, but this comment stuck in my mind for a minute. Deja vu, I guess.
Is this a stock comment that gets attached to a lot of KDE articles or something? 'Cause I've seen it before.
It doesn't really matter I guess, because the post makes some good points. Personally, I love KDE.
J