1.1 01/29/01 Fix typos. Made disclaimers scarier. Removed snotty references to Americans.
[...] Improper use of cola might result in blunt trauma, puncture wounds, physical illness, mental illness, caffeine dependency, dental necrosis, acid reflux, death, devastation, and random tax audits. Or it might not.
[etc, etc, cool recipe instructions and some humor]
Maybe it does have a place, but I've seen it used where it should never be. Such as databases. char_Firstname and tbl_Employee is cool, until you want to change things, so the table is now a view and the char is now a varchar, and you have the wonderment of trying to decipher code that has just been obfuscated for you. Joy.
My fear is that we could see optimizations of the XSL attack breaking AES with a 2^80-ish complexity, in which case things starts to get dicey about ten years from now.(emphasis added by me)
So, ten years or more. Heck, at that point, shouldn't quantum computers be breaking this stuff anyhow?
Naw, review it, but bitch about the how the quality of the sound, the mix, the production, all suck. Since I'm sure the headphones are pieces of crap, seems like a legit review to me.
Reading the blurb gave me an interesting idea. Say they are filtering text, not just IP addresses. Set up a search engine that doesn't return text, but an image of the text. I know there's software out there. Interesting idea - what would the processing power be to OCR the text, looking for keywords? Especially if it was just a JPG or GIF. And if that works? Just do a "mirror" image of the resultant picture - good luck OCRing that without help.
Note this doesn't solve the problem, though, since whatever site is built to do this could be added to the block list on the firewall.
(tons of spoilers - I just finished watching last night)
Odd, I thought this season kept building on what Season 5 offered, and was better than season 4. And of course, let me toss in the fanboy "Angel sucks, aside from Spike's monologue in Season 1" (you know, where Spike "narrates" a meeting between Angel and some female - "now to get some of that Nancy-boy hair gel I like so much. Quickly, to the Angel-mobile, away!).
Lessee. Buffy had to get a real job, deal with being alive again, tormented by coming back, the sexual relationship with Spike, the Legion of Supernerds, The Asylum, her best friend going bad etc, etc.
This could have become the 90125 season of Buffy, and while it had flirtations with it, pulled through with spirit intact. Maybe it was a little too dark. Maybe the last 5 episodes were a little too cliffhanger. Maybe the tone this season was a bit dark. Maybe the ending was a little too quickly resolved (I found it damn clever that Xander, who keeps being picked on for being normal, saves the world). But it rocked, harder than any other season. I didn't think they'd be able to beat last season. Happily, I was wrong.
More than anything, this was almost a "piss off the fanboy" season. Joss has been known to do this, and I think either he or Marti decided to do it HARD this season:
Kill off a major character, turn another into the season's "Big Bad", threaten their relationship with the show (Asylum), go a little dark with the Spike relationship. Oh, and make fun of the fanbase... I died laughing pretty much every time with the Legion of Supernerds. How many people posting here right now ARE those guys, but without the jet packs? Hell, I'm a nerd, I found it frickin hilarious.
I'm having a house built. I can't touch things until I move in, but then I can retrofit. Some of the things I see include the tile warmer (no cold feet), the mirror warmer (no fog), IR light switches (walk in and it turns on).
What else would y'all recommend? I'd rather have a smarter house than a smarter remote. Oh, and I don't want to give X-10 any of my money. The last thing I want to do is encourage their ads.
I'm going to agree with the other people who have mentioned the new IBM Power4. And, provided the G5 ever comes out, it would potentially put Apple back in the game, performance-wise.
That is, of course, if the rumored speeds are to be believed (G5 1.6ghz is supposed to have roughly twice the SpecFP and SpecINT of a P4-2ghz - The Register). Due in January, last I heard. We'll see.
I can see the possibility of them going to another chip manufacturer, and AMD would be the most likely - IIRC, the AMD architecture is emulating the x86 on half the die, with the other half being RISC based. If they could come up with a PPC emulator, it might be doable. That being said, NeXT _was_ running on x86.
As for Marklar being the phrase? Well, this is the company that had BHA (Butt-headed astronomer - one was originally coded Sagan, and Sagan threatened to sue) as a code phrase. And saying Marklar would actually make discussing things in public possible. (aka "So, did you figure out issue X with Marklar"?). But that would also indicate that it's a little under 3 years old (Starvin Marvin in Space airdate: 11/17/99). If they started around then on it, then that might work, but it's starting to sound implausible.
So, like most things Apple: who knows? only time will tell.
In related news, Microsoft has decided to close its doors, saying that Linux does what it does, for free. The xxx$ billion in the bank will go to its shareholders, who have been dumb enough not to insist on dividends, despite the fact that MS has xxx$ billion in cash.
Two comments - 1) I know DirectTV used to have a series of commercial free stations, like ACTION, MYSTERY, etc. They were standard TV shows (I remember Highlander on Action and The Prisoner elsewhere), just syndicated on these channels. 15 minute break between shows, where they'd advertise other shows on that channel and the like. Are those still around?
2) Tumbleweed: HBO has one good show, and I pay to watch it - Dennis Miller Live. Showtime has two: Odyssey 5 and Jeremiah.
I liked it quite a bit. It made Debian easy, which is no small feat. Someone mentioned that a minimal Unix install is nice, and Debian does that, and so Corel did. What I liked about it was that it was fairly easy to run - all the basic stuff and end-user needed, the Corel Update (apt-get GUI), and it installs on almost anything, without asking you specific details about all your hardware. It just frickin worked. Nice.
Oh, and Xandros' web site offers a download of Corel Linux 2.
Hey, at least I didn't lose any karma on that. Actually, I ran Debian (first CLOS, then Debian) for about 2 years, decided to try out Lycoris, hated that, went Red Hat (um, why doesn't redhat-network-config get installed by default?), over to Mandrake (using currently), and am playing with SuSE.
Oddly enough, X died a week or so ago on my Mandrake box, so I'll go fix later this week, when I have some time. Why is it my fault if I install an EASY TO USE distro and then I don't want to learn all the intracacies in order to get a GUI? This is why Linux isn't on the desktop yet.
My goal on playing with all the distros periodically is to find one that our end users could deal with, and that would make a nice, easy, friendly workstation/server for me. So that I don't ever need Windows.
Oh and the insight - the original question. What the hell differentiates TurboLinux? (Now I know - Japanese support)
And some more -
Lycoris - really wants to be XP. CLOS - Only OS I'd trust my parents with, even outdated as it is (and yes, I config'd it to update packages - and that broke it utterly) Xandros - if it ever comes out, will be the OS I give my parents. Gentoo - a true roll your own linux. It'll finish compiling next week.;)
I remember it mentioned once or twice, but it had about zero mindshare for me.
Here's my thoughts on the different distros. YMWV: Mandrake - easy to run version of Red Hat Red Hat - standard distro, supposed to be really cool but I can never get to work right SuSE - YAST2 is cool Debian - bitch to install, cake to keep up; apt-get Slackware - some sort of hard core linux Turbolinux - *shrug*
You're fscking kidding, right? Their support appears to be a "we're going to toss bones at some open source developers and see if _they_ can get our sh!t to work".
I bought an ATI All-in-Wonder to use to do some video capture, VCD some TV shows, etc. On the windows side, the box wouldn't work (it needs to be the ONLY video card in the system, or it either doesn't work or locks up your system in 90 seconds - I timed it.). So with my top-of-the-line 3D card, I need to physically remove it when I want to record video - even telling the AGP card to be secondary doesn't work... it STILL locks up. Their vaunted tech support answer? "um, just use our card for 3d, or remove the other one each time". Um, pass.
So I decided to use it for a PVR in Linux. Good luck getting that to work. There's this thing called GATOS, which works on SOME of the ATI Video Capture cards (and not necessarily all of the same model), but is apparently too complicated for me... (okay, I need to install this Kernel Module, recompile the kernel, make sure the headers are where it thinks they should be, download from a CVS tree the latest source, install that, install this other thing, then a program to watch TV and another to record!)
Aside from Flying Lab's DG conversion (www.deltagreen.com for a modern-day Conspiracy-based CoC), Sandy said this: Sandy Petersen: Now I'm on a super-secret project that has nothing to do with RTS games.
GameSpy: Ah, so Ensemble's next game isn't an RTS? It's a new Call of Cthulhu game, right?!!
Sandy Petersen: (laughs) Yeah, sure, you could say that.
GameSpy: Will you get in trouble with Microsoft if I do?
Sandy Petersen: No, because it's not true! (laughs) I've wanted to do one for a while now; I'm trying to drum up support for it.
Looks like the webmaster of Twin Supply reads /...
on
Toilet Paper Algorithms
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Decided to take a look, see what kind of dual-roll dispensers are available, and voila... a sale!
Don't know if it was deliberate or not, but what a great way to utilitze the Slashdot Effect...
Remember, the movie industry makes far more by selling VHS/DVDs of the movie than the movie actually made in theaters. If this wasn't the case, we would still be subject to rereleases in theaters (not that that's entirely gone away, it's just that Disney's about the only company still doing it, things like Apocalypse Now Redux notwithstanding), since the studios release movies of their own volition.
That being said, that's exactly what DivX was - a way to get money everytime you watch it.
[Scott Charney, Microsoft] We're doing this thing called "Trustworthy Computing." It's an evolving concept. We've come up with our new paradigm, SD3[...]
A-ha! It's just a small leap to go from SD-3 to SD-6. Insert joke about covert evil organizations here.
Holy cow! Okay, that's almost freakishly impressive. Only thing I'm not sure of is what it takes to set it up. I'm one of those with an All-in-Wonder, which in Linux is not all that easy to set up. Gatos, KM, kernel source, blah blah blah.
Time to go find out how to install it. Kudos to the author!
Two GUI Design links and a question
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 2
First, the links: 1) www.asktog.com - Tog was one of the big Mac GUI guys originally. Browse his site, you'll find all sorts of stuff, like Fitt's law (which NWN actually takes heed of!), good vs. bad design, etc. A genius.
2) www.nooface.org - "In Search of the Post-PC interface". Basically, where do we go from here, in terms of interface. Great reading- like Slashdot for Interfaces.
And the question - What is the Raskin project actually attempting to do? I honestly couldn't figure out what they were offering, what it looked like, what it did, or how to get a copy to find out. I could make a joke about the GUI site having bad design, but I won't. I just find it frustrating that I can't see what they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Work on those taskbar icons. Y'all can do better.
2) PLEASE let there be an easy "Internet Sharing" wizard.
Um, that should be modded up for being funny, NOT insightful. Come on, I called BINGO halfway through the second paragraph.
Actually, go read the pdf. Hilarious...
1.1
01/29/01
Fix typos. Made disclaimers scarier. Removed snotty references to Americans.
[...]
Improper use of cola might result in blunt trauma, puncture wounds, physical illness, mental illness, caffeine dependency, dental necrosis, acid reflux, death, devastation, and random tax audits. Or it might not.
[etc, etc, cool recipe instructions and some humor]
Maybe it does have a place, but I've seen it used where it should never be. Such as databases. char_Firstname and tbl_Employee is cool, until you want to change things, so the table is now a view and the char is now a varchar, and you have the wonderment of trying to decipher code that has just been obfuscated for you. Joy.
My fear is that we could see optimizations of the XSL attack breaking AES with a 2^80-ish complexity, in which case things starts to get dicey about ten years from now. (emphasis added by me)
So, ten years or more. Heck, at that point, shouldn't quantum computers be breaking this stuff anyhow?
Naw, review it, but bitch about the how the quality of the sound, the mix, the production, all suck. Since I'm sure the headphones are pieces of crap, seems like a legit review to me.
Custom robot, shmustom robot. They just need one of these:
h tm l
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/fun-stuff/5776.s
(Mini Rover)
Reading the blurb gave me an interesting idea. Say they are filtering text, not just IP addresses. Set up a search engine that doesn't return text, but an image of the text. I know there's software out there. Interesting idea - what would the processing power be to OCR the text, looking for keywords? Especially if it was just a JPG or GIF. And if that works? Just do a "mirror" image of the resultant picture - good luck OCRing that without help.
Note this doesn't solve the problem, though, since whatever site is built to do this could be added to the block list on the firewall.
Shadowrun mentions this, in some detail. IIRC, it involves a lattice of fiber that redirects light around you.
And it doesn't have to be in detail - Heinlein patented the waterbag. Okay, bad example - trivial to implement, tough to invent.
Tract home.
(tons of spoilers - I just finished watching last night)
Odd, I thought this season kept building on what Season 5 offered, and was better than season 4. And of course, let me toss in the fanboy "Angel sucks, aside from Spike's monologue in Season 1"
(you know, where Spike "narrates" a meeting between Angel and some female - "now to get some of that Nancy-boy hair gel I like so much. Quickly, to the Angel-mobile, away!).
Lessee. Buffy had to get a real job, deal with being alive again, tormented by coming back, the sexual relationship with Spike, the Legion of Supernerds, The Asylum, her best friend going bad etc, etc.
This could have become the 90125 season of Buffy, and while it had flirtations with it, pulled through with spirit intact. Maybe it was a little too dark. Maybe the last 5 episodes were a little too cliffhanger. Maybe the tone this season was a bit dark. Maybe the ending was a little too quickly resolved (I found it damn clever that Xander, who keeps being picked on for being normal, saves the world). But it rocked, harder than any other season. I didn't think they'd be able to beat last season. Happily, I was wrong.
More than anything, this was almost a "piss off the fanboy" season. Joss has been known to do this, and I think either he or Marti decided to do it HARD this season:
Kill off a major character, turn another into the season's "Big Bad", threaten their relationship with the show (Asylum), go a little dark with the Spike relationship. Oh, and make fun of the fanbase... I died laughing pretty much every time with the Legion of Supernerds. How many people posting here right now ARE those guys, but without the jet packs? Hell, I'm a nerd, I found it frickin hilarious.
What were your complaints again?
(feel free to answer - easier than Ask Slashdot!)
I'm having a house built. I can't touch things until I move in, but then I can retrofit. Some of the things I see include the tile warmer (no cold feet), the mirror warmer (no fog), IR light switches (walk in and it turns on).
What else would y'all recommend? I'd rather have a smarter house than a smarter remote. Oh, and I don't want to give X-10 any of my money. The last thing I want to do is encourage their ads.
I'm going to agree with the other people who have mentioned the new IBM Power4. And, provided the G5 ever comes out, it would potentially put Apple back in the game, performance-wise.
That is, of course, if the rumored speeds are to be believed (G5 1.6ghz is supposed to have roughly twice the SpecFP and SpecINT of a P4-2ghz - The Register). Due in January, last I heard. We'll see.
I can see the possibility of them going to another chip manufacturer, and AMD would be the most likely - IIRC, the AMD architecture is emulating the x86 on half the die, with the other half being RISC based. If they could come up with a PPC emulator, it might be doable. That being said, NeXT _was_ running on x86.
As for Marklar being the phrase? Well, this is the company that had BHA (Butt-headed astronomer - one was originally coded Sagan, and Sagan threatened to sue) as a code phrase. And saying Marklar would actually make discussing things in public possible. (aka "So, did you figure out issue X with Marklar"?). But that would also indicate that it's a little under 3 years old (Starvin Marvin in Space airdate: 11/17/99). If they started around then on it, then that might work, but it's starting to sound implausible.
So, like most things Apple: who knows? only time will tell.
In related news, Microsoft has decided to close its doors, saying that Linux does what it does, for free. The xxx$ billion in the bank will go to its shareholders, who have been dumb enough not to insist on dividends, despite the fact that MS has xxx$ billion in cash.
We wish.
Two comments -
1) I know DirectTV used to have a series of commercial free stations, like ACTION, MYSTERY, etc. They were standard TV shows (I remember Highlander on Action and The Prisoner elsewhere), just syndicated on these channels. 15 minute break between shows, where they'd advertise other shows on that channel and the like. Are those still around?
2) Tumbleweed: HBO has one good show, and I pay to watch it - Dennis Miller Live. Showtime has two: Odyssey 5 and Jeremiah.
I liked it quite a bit. It made Debian easy, which is no small feat. Someone mentioned that a minimal Unix install is nice, and Debian does that, and so Corel did. What I liked about it was that it was fairly easy to run - all the basic stuff and end-user needed, the Corel Update (apt-get GUI), and it installs on almost anything, without asking you specific details about all your hardware. It just frickin worked. Nice.
Oh, and Xandros' web site offers a download of Corel Linux 2.
Hey, at least I didn't lose any karma on that. Actually, I ran Debian (first CLOS, then Debian) for about 2 years, decided to try out Lycoris, hated that, went Red Hat (um, why doesn't redhat-network-config get installed by default?), over to Mandrake (using currently), and am playing with SuSE.
;)
Oddly enough, X died a week or so ago on my Mandrake box, so I'll go fix later this week, when I have some time. Why is it my fault if I install an EASY TO USE distro and then I don't want to learn all the intracacies in order to get a GUI? This is why Linux isn't on the desktop yet.
My goal on playing with all the distros periodically is to find one that our end users could deal with, and that would make a nice, easy, friendly workstation/server for me. So that I don't ever need Windows.
Oh and the insight - the original question. What the hell differentiates TurboLinux? (Now I know - Japanese support)
And some more -
Lycoris - really wants to be XP.
CLOS - Only OS I'd trust my parents with, even outdated as it is (and yes, I config'd it to update packages - and that broke it utterly)
Xandros - if it ever comes out, will be the OS I give my parents.
Gentoo - a true roll your own linux. It'll finish compiling next week.
I remember it mentioned once or twice, but it had about zero mindshare for me.
Here's my thoughts on the different distros. YMWV:
Mandrake - easy to run version of Red Hat
Red Hat - standard distro, supposed to be really cool but I can never get to work right
SuSE - YAST2 is cool
Debian - bitch to install, cake to keep up; apt-get
Slackware - some sort of hard core linux
Turbolinux - *shrug*
What was TurboLinux known for?
You're fscking kidding, right? Their support appears to be a "we're going to toss bones at some open source developers and see if _they_ can get our sh!t to work".
I bought an ATI All-in-Wonder to use to do some video capture, VCD some TV shows, etc. On the windows side, the box wouldn't work (it needs to be the ONLY video card in the system, or it either doesn't work or locks up your system in 90 seconds - I timed it.). So with my top-of-the-line 3D card, I need to physically remove it when I want to record video - even telling the AGP card to be secondary doesn't work... it STILL locks up. Their vaunted tech support answer? "um, just use our card for 3d, or remove the other one each time". Um, pass.
So I decided to use it for a PVR in Linux. Good luck getting that to work. There's this thing called GATOS, which works on SOME of the ATI Video Capture cards (and not necessarily all of the same model), but is apparently too complicated for me... (okay, I need to install this Kernel Module, recompile the kernel, make sure the headers are where it thinks they should be, download from a CVS tree the latest source, install that, install this other thing, then a program to watch TV and another to record!)
ATI - NEVER AGAIN.
Aside from Flying Lab's DG conversion (www.deltagreen.com for a modern-day Conspiracy-based CoC), Sandy said this:
Sandy Petersen: Now I'm on a super-secret project that has nothing to do with RTS games.
GameSpy: Ah, so Ensemble's next game isn't an RTS? It's a new Call of Cthulhu game, right?!!
Sandy Petersen: (laughs) Yeah, sure, you could say that.
GameSpy: Will you get in trouble with Microsoft if I do?
Sandy Petersen: No, because it's not true! (laughs) I've wanted to do one for a while now; I'm trying to drum up support for it.
Decided to take a look, see what kind of dual-roll dispensers are available, and voila... a sale!
Don't know if it was deliberate or not, but what a great way to utilitze the Slashdot Effect...
Remember, the movie industry makes far more by selling VHS/DVDs of the movie than the movie actually made in theaters. If this wasn't the case, we would still be subject to rereleases in theaters (not that that's entirely gone away, it's just that Disney's about the only company still doing it, things like Apocalypse Now Redux notwithstanding), since the studios release movies of their own volition.
That being said, that's exactly what DivX was - a way to get money everytime you watch it.
[Scott Charney, Microsoft]
We're doing this thing called "Trustworthy Computing." It's an evolving concept. We've come up with our new paradigm, SD3[...]
A-ha! It's just a small leap to go from SD-3 to SD-6. Insert joke about covert evil organizations here.
Yes, it's funny. Laugh.
Holy cow! Okay, that's almost freakishly impressive. Only thing I'm not sure of is what it takes to set it up. I'm one of those with an All-in-Wonder, which in Linux is not all that easy to set up. Gatos, KM, kernel source, blah blah blah.
Time to go find out how to install it. Kudos to the author!
First, the links:
1) www.asktog.com - Tog was one of the big Mac GUI guys originally. Browse his site, you'll find all sorts of stuff, like Fitt's law (which NWN actually takes heed of!), good vs. bad design, etc. A genius.
2) www.nooface.org - "In Search of the Post-PC interface". Basically, where do we go from here, in terms of interface. Great reading- like Slashdot for Interfaces.
And the question -
What is the Raskin project actually attempting to do? I honestly couldn't figure out what they were offering, what it looked like, what it did, or how to get a copy to find out. I could make a joke about the GUI site having bad design, but I won't. I just find it frustrating that I can't see what they're doing.