I don't believe that the damage was necessarily done by the installer script acting as root. rm -Rf/partition will remove all files that you own and can reach from/partition. If you are the only user on your system, you might well own almost every file on every partition so the damage would be immense.
Also, how would the installer get sudoed? You don't run installers from the command line, you double click a file, right? (And wouldn't anyone be REALLY skeptical of an installer that had to run as root to install?)
I work for a company in New York City named Netomat
(http://netomat.net) and it's more fun than a barrel of monkeys -- art programming, a new XML graphics and animation language, and a clear and aesthetically pleasing code base (because I wrote nearly every line of it so far, see my sample code here.
If you are a disciplined, brilliant and artistic Java programmer with a deep and broad knowledge of programming then send me email here.
Sorry for the plug but I've been thinking recently how lucky I was to be having fun at my job while everyone else works on financial programming and ecommerce...
Laplace wrote: Every extra day that I take to plan, every minute I spend thinking about design, and every extra line of code I write to make my software more pleasing is another line that could add more functionality, another minute wasted not producing something tangible, and another day that I need to be paid. When it comes right down to it, most software is just good enough to get the job done because that is what is most profitable in the short term.
For my part, every minute I spend on making my code cleaner and more aesthetic comes back to me three-fold when I find bugs before the testers do and when I have to make changes later. Life is too short not to do your best work all the time!
Damn, I'm all choked up here, I've read so many of his books.
Don't think anyone mentioned "The High Crusade" which is a very strong and funny book where English knights take over a UFO and take the Crusade back to the aliens. Funny, moving, just like a lot of his books.
Perhaps they'll re-release Three Hearts and Three Lions again. What a great book -- I have two copies. Surprised to read that it's hard to get, it's SUCH a good read.
A.I. experts, cognitive scientists, etc. still disagree about whether it would be possible to create true "intelligence" using even a super-advanced form of any technology that is feasible today (specifically, digital technology). Even if it is possible, it is so far from reality today that A.I. is still a more suitable subject for science fiction and parlor conversation than for political debate.
Just saying it doesn't make it so -- got any references or should we just take your word on it?
Right today, computers do many things that were entirely the province of human intelligence a decade ago: they play chess at the highest levels, recognize speech, translate text (more or less), conjecture and prove mathematical theorems -- and they can read and summarize your typical business document.
And there are certainly a lot of promising projects that look like they might bear fruit,
see eg Douglas Lenat's CYC. If CYC does what it's supposed to, then it would be artificial intelligence.
Apart from the fact that, as other posters have noted, there's no information given on the bit rates or encoders used, the article straight-out admits that "the test sessions were done in a home environment with an ordinary stereo system".
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching.
Level matching is particularly the most important thing to achieve. The classic way an audio salesman gets you to buy the most expensive speakers is to have them just a little louder than the cheaper speakers... one or two dB is all you need to make it seem SO much better!
So, while many folks believe they can hear more details than others (and admittedly, I'm sure recordings exist that still have these details in them), by and large - these details were lost on the studio post-processing floor. The goal of post-processing is apparently not to deliver the most hi-fi sound - its to deliver the music in a way that it sounds good in the most diverse environments.
This isn't correct.
To start with, only a small portion of the music that is released is given the "ultra-compress" treatment to make it car-radio friendly. Whole genres like jazz, classical and electronic are not treated at all in many cases (there's a whole school of purist classical recordists now who use 2 mics and NO processing of any type), or are treated in such a way as to emphasize the small details.
Your average jazz or classical buff would return a CD that was treated like a radio hit!
Second, even the radio treated stuff has a great deal of detail that is preserved. Engineers go to ridiculous extremes to come up with the correct reverberation, envelopes for drums (particularly) and the like. Their idea is NOT to reduce detail but to manage dynamics and presentation so that the mix sounds good on a car radio. If you don't believe this is true, A/B compare something radio-ized like the Spice Girls against The Who.
Frankly, if you spend 10 minutes with a decent set of speakers and compare a CD against an MP3 of the same song, you'll hear what I mean, you really don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate it. You get better results as your bitrate increases but there's a dramatic difference.
Try something demanding like a chamber orchestra recording. (I like to use The Orb's Orblivion to test systems but it's not as good if you don't know it really well).
If you are listening on your average computer speakers, well, it'll all sound a bit thin anyway so it'd be hard to tell the difference...
Ozone depletion (yes, it IS linked to global warming) is worsening.
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
Quite a unique point of view on chemistry you have there... it seems completely ridiculous to me, got any actual evidence for this theory, or at least a real chemist who espouses it?
now if i can only do something about first financial bank calling me every night to offer me a credit card that i don't want, even after repeated requests by me to put me on their do not call list.
in the US, you can sue them in small claims court for a few hundred bucks per call if you keep believable records.
before that law, I used to insist upon talking to the manager, and them tell him that the next time I got calls from them I'd sue for criminal harrassment and put his name in the complaint. worked like a charm every time.
Works for me. Plus, here in the US, spam is protected speech. If we stop spam, it will just be the start of banning all speech. We should not stand by and watch Motorola wipe out our rights. Plus, how are people going to know what new products are available to them with out ads? The economy is having a hard enough time with out regulating how companies can advertise and generate new revenue streams.
That was probably a troll but...
commercial speech is NOT protected in the US. you have a right to free speech, not to advertise your products. There are many laws which reflect this fact, eg, the anti-junk-fax laws.
If they really need to have us hear about their new product, they can pay to mail us stuff, they can pay to advertise on a TV program or newspaper or website, but they have no right to send us postage-due advertising for free like junk email, junk faxes or junk pages.
When they have to close up shop because they cant pay for the bandwidth, the bandwidth companies will start to lose. This will in turn make the bandwidth a *LOT* cheaper, or better options for sites.
Wow, that's wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start!
0) once the sites are out-of-business, they're gone. they aren't going to come back from the grave just because they can save money on bandwidth.
1) if fewer places are using bandwidth, the price will go UP, not down, as the ISPs desperately try to make some money with fewer clients. If they consolidate, the prices will go up even more.
2) connectivity expenses aren't the largest cost for sites, personnel costs are (by far!)
the other thing that's crazy is that whatever algorithm that CDDB uses to identify CDs doesn't
generate a unique key for every CD! I believe that the "key" is made up of the lengths of each song title in seconds, which as you can imagine is hardly a hash that's guaranteed to be unique.
I hope that the free services have fixed that problem...
I was wanting to write a Java client to their CDDB. Well, they made this impossible in MULTIPLE ways.
First, in order to get a look at their API (just
the documentation, not even the libraries!) I needed to sign a *16-page* document that enjoined me to do all sorts of ridiculous things like never switch to a competitor's product.
Now, their original interface, CDDB-1, was a simple and reasonable socket interface.
Even though all the clients I'd seen were using their CDDB-1 API, they would not allow documentation for this out under any circumstances, instead forcing new users to use CDDB-2, a DCOM(!) interface.
When I asked them how I was supposed to use this DCOM interface from Java and my Linux Cobalt server, they said I should be using a professional server (which I took to mean Windows) to do my work. When I indicated that I wasn't going to migrate to a Windows server, could I please see the CDDB-1 documentation, they ceased to reply to me.
I was completely disgusted with them and can't imagine ever doing business with such people.
jxta actually written by collab.net?
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, I heard that jxta was actually written by collab.net, a most interesting SF-based collaboration company.... however I can't find any corroboration for this on either site, anyone got any leads on this?
I posted a list of what seemed to me to be very difficult issues in the first few weeks of the gnutella-dev mailing list (there don't seem to be archives online, not a good sign).
This included the fact that load on each server grows proportionally to the total number of servers, so the total CPU usage for the whole system grows quadratically. There are also serious issues with naming, searching, tagging, and other things that could have been dealt with.
There didn't seem to be much interest in this so I moved to lurking the Freenet mailing list, which seems to be a much more grownup way of doing the same thing.
The separate pieces are needed because almost all the pieces have special rules, pawn first moves, ep, castling, king into check, rooks can't castle after being moved, that sort of thing.
"Most useful stuff is client side anyhow, and PHP works nicely for that."
I assume you mean "server-side" -- PHP typically runs in your web server. I've just spent a few weeks working on PHP extensions, and I can safely say that PHP is one of the worst designed packages I've ever used. For example, you have to use C, it's completely unfriendly to C++ (some of their include files go as far as using C++ reserved words as identifiers!) There is literally NO documentation for the mysterious Zend interface functions inside C -- you have to go to the
(uncommented) code. There is a dementedly obsessive usage of macros. The make system requires the use of absolute paths! (though you can work around it).
Java is perfectly acceptable for server-side activities and has the advantage of being a nice formal system...
Slashdot Mirror
In 30 minutes, nothing changes.
In 30 days, you'll see a little growth.
In 30 months you'll see major progress.
In 30 years it will all be filled in.
Also, how would the installer get sudoed? You don't run installers from the command line, you double click a file, right? (And wouldn't anyone be REALLY skeptical of an installer that had to run as root to install?)
Go requires ultimate strategy!
and, is this a first post?
(http://netomat.net) and it's more fun than a barrel of monkeys -- art programming, a new XML graphics and animation language, and a clear and aesthetically pleasing code base (because I wrote nearly every line of it so far, see my sample code here.
If you are a disciplined, brilliant and artistic Java programmer with a deep and broad knowledge of programming then send me email here.
Sorry for the plug but I've been thinking recently how lucky I was to be having fun at my job while everyone else works on financial programming and ecommerce...
Every extra day that I take to plan, every minute I spend thinking about design, and every extra line of code I write to make my software more pleasing is another line that could add more functionality, another minute wasted not producing something tangible, and another day that I need to be paid. When it comes right down to it, most software is just good enough to get the job done because that is what is most profitable in the short term.
For my part, every minute I spend on making my code cleaner and more aesthetic comes back to me three-fold when I find bugs before the testers do and when I have to make changes later. Life is too short not to do your best work all the time!
and yes, I do have samples.
I went strolling through Amazon -- it's Fredrik Pohl (no "c")... sorry about that.
Don't think anyone mentioned "The High Crusade" which is a very strong and funny book where English knights take over a UFO and take the Crusade back to the aliens. Funny, moving, just like a lot of his books.
Perhaps they'll re-release Three Hearts and Three Lions again. What a great book -- I have two copies. Surprised to read that it's hard to get, it's SUCH a good read.
Goodbye, Pohl, you'll be missed.
written by Fredrick Pohl who is thankfully still with us.
Just saying it doesn't make it so -- got any references or should we just take your word on it?
Right today, computers do many things that were entirely the province of human intelligence a decade ago: they play chess at the highest levels, recognize speech, translate text (more or less), conjecture and prove mathematical theorems -- and they can read and summarize your typical business document.
And there are certainly a lot of promising projects that look like they might bear fruit, see eg Douglas Lenat's CYC. If CYC does what it's supposed to, then it would be artificial intelligence.
What evidence do you have for your case?
Which, I'll warrant, means no double blinding and no level matching.
Level matching is particularly the most important thing to achieve. The classic way an audio salesman gets you to buy the most expensive speakers is to have them just a little louder than the cheaper speakers... one or two dB is all you need to make it seem SO much better!
volume : perceived audio quality :: salt : food
This isn't correct.
To start with, only a small portion of the music that is released is given the "ultra-compress" treatment to make it car-radio friendly. Whole genres like jazz, classical and electronic are not treated at all in many cases (there's a whole school of purist classical recordists now who use 2 mics and NO processing of any type), or are treated in such a way as to emphasize the small details.
Your average jazz or classical buff would return a CD that was treated like a radio hit!
Second, even the radio treated stuff has a great deal of detail that is preserved. Engineers go to ridiculous extremes to come up with the correct reverberation, envelopes for drums (particularly) and the like. Their idea is NOT to reduce detail but to manage dynamics and presentation so that the mix sounds good on a car radio. If you don't believe this is true, A/B compare something radio-ized like the Spice Girls against The Who.
Frankly, if you spend 10 minutes with a decent set of speakers and compare a CD against an MP3 of the same song, you'll hear what I mean, you really don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate it. You get better results as your bitrate increases but there's a dramatic difference.
Try something demanding like a chamber orchestra recording. (I like to use The Orb's Orblivion to test systems but it's not as good if you don't know it really well).
If you are listening on your average computer speakers, well, it'll all sound a bit thin anyway so it'd be hard to tell the difference...
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
Quite a unique point of view on chemistry you have there... it seems completely ridiculous to me, got any actual evidence for this theory, or at least a real chemist who espouses it?
in the US, you can sue them in small claims court for a few hundred bucks per call if you keep believable records.
before that law, I used to insist upon talking to the manager, and them tell him that the next time I got calls from them I'd sue for criminal harrassment and put his name in the complaint. worked like a charm every time.
That was probably a troll but...
commercial speech is NOT protected in the US. you have a right to free speech, not to advertise your products. There are many laws which reflect this fact, eg, the anti-junk-fax laws.
If they really need to have us hear about their new product, they can pay to mail us stuff, they can pay to advertise on a TV program or newspaper or website, but they have no right to send us postage-due advertising for free like junk email, junk faxes or junk pages.
When they have to close up shop because they cant pay for the bandwidth, the bandwidth companies will start to lose. This will in turn make the bandwidth a *LOT* cheaper, or better options for sites.
Wow, that's wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start!
0) once the sites are out-of-business, they're gone. they aren't going to come back from the grave just because they can save money on bandwidth.
1) if fewer places are using bandwidth, the price will go UP, not down, as the ISPs desperately try to make some money with fewer clients. If they consolidate, the prices will go up even more.
2) connectivity expenses aren't the largest cost for sites, personnel costs are (by far!)
Someone has to pay for all those sites. Since we the viewers aren't paying for them, it has to be advertisers.
If one form of advertising particularly bothers you, just don't purchase the product advertised. They'll catch on really fast...
I hope that the free services have fixed that problem...
I was wanting to write a Java client to their CDDB. Well, they made this impossible in MULTIPLE ways. First, in order to get a look at their API (just the documentation, not even the libraries!) I needed to sign a *16-page* document that enjoined me to do all sorts of ridiculous things like never switch to a competitor's product.
Now, their original interface, CDDB-1, was a simple and reasonable socket interface. Even though all the clients I'd seen were using their CDDB-1 API, they would not allow documentation for this out under any circumstances, instead forcing new users to use CDDB-2, a DCOM(!) interface.
When I asked them how I was supposed to use this DCOM interface from Java and my Linux Cobalt server, they said I should be using a professional server (which I took to mean Windows) to do my work. When I indicated that I wasn't going to migrate to a Windows server, could I please see the CDDB-1 documentation, they ceased to reply to me.
I was completely disgusted with them and can't imagine ever doing business with such people.
Hmm, I heard that jxta was actually written by collab.net, a most interesting SF-based collaboration company.... however I can't find any corroboration for this on either site, anyone got any leads on this?
This included the fact that load on each server grows proportionally to the total number of servers, so the total CPU usage for the whole system grows quadratically. There are also serious issues with naming, searching, tagging, and other things that could have been dealt with.
There didn't seem to be much interest in this so I moved to lurking the Freenet mailing list, which seems to be a much more grownup way of doing the same thing.
The Java code can be found here.
There's a lot of stuff there, feel free to wander around.
Only the bishop and queen have no special moves.
I brought the code out and you can see it here.
The javadoc is here, with links to the code, and I chat a bit about it here.
I assume you mean "server-side" -- PHP typically runs in your web server. I've just spent a few weeks working on PHP extensions, and I can safely say that PHP is one of the worst designed packages I've ever used. For example, you have to use C, it's completely unfriendly to C++ (some of their include files go as far as using C++ reserved words as identifiers!) There is literally NO documentation for the mysterious Zend interface functions inside C -- you have to go to the (uncommented) code. There is a dementedly obsessive usage of macros. The make system requires the use of absolute paths! (though you can work around it). Java is perfectly acceptable for server-side activities and has the advantage of being a nice formal system...
That was no Dick, that was an old Sturgeon!
(The statement "95% of everything is crap" is named Sturgeon's law after its proposer, the late great SF writer Theodore Sturgeon.)