Yeah, the concept of an "amateur liar" was cracking me up too. We all know who the "professional liars" are, but it's funny to think of "professional training" in lying. "The liar you are about to see is a trained and experienced professional operating under controlled conditions. Do not attempt to lie in this fashion at home!"
For a starting price of $5K, I expect 88 high-quality weighted pressure+velocity sensitive keys. Their actual keyboard looks like plastic garbage offhand, although I'd have to see one live to be sure. "Semi-Weighted Synth-Action Keyboard" probably means I'm right.
I'm not yet impressed: my $800 Fatar POS MIDI controller might be nicer to play. I plug it into a computer if I want it connected to a computer---computer runs Linux, too. MIDI rules.
I only care about one thing in my audio HW these days, and it ain't bandwidth and it ain't dynamic range. 16 bits + 22KHz is plenty for me.
I want tiny latency. Single sample, if I can have it. Think about it: at 44K samples/sec, that
means that you now have about 50K CPU cycles/sample to process stuff. This should be more than enough cycles to get a word in off ADC, process it extensively, and get it back onto the DAC.
PCI adds incredible latency, and IRQ handling adds more. Give me an audio HW standard with a path that lets me grab a sample, process it, and stick it on the output before the next sample is due out, and I assure you Linux-based SW such as JACK will immediately take full advantage!
Why care? Two big reasons: (1) professional studios and musicians view this as a requirement for their audio tasks. As an amateur keyboard player, I couldn't agree more. (2) syncing audio, video, and other events is a billion times easier in this setting.
Big mandatory audio buffers are evil. Please make them go away, without making me buy $2K worth of Hammerfall products. In return, I promise to replace all my audio HW with HW using the new Intel audio standard.
I don't feel strongly, to be honest. It's nice to do the simple twm thing, but I wanted to consciously try to be more like "the rest of them" just to see how it was going these days. I found that KDE is no worse for most of what I do than twm, and I can communicate with and share my machine with my peers a bit easier this way. Besides, the eye candy is fun.
My 16MB P5/133 laptop still runs twm:-). But it won't really run a modern browser, either.
For me, the journey has been more like 20 years. I was running a desktop window system on a UNIX-like OS at home before there was such a thing as X (Smalltalk on LynxOS on a Tektronix Pegasus box).
I have to say that I think the folks who are all over the deficiencies of the Linux Desktop, and how we have to emulate the Windows/Mac/BeOS/Xbox/Sinclair/whatever desktop experience to have a usable desktop are mistaken. I think they underestimate the ability of users to adapt, and overestimate the degree to which familiar = better. For many years I had a PC or Mac sitting on my desktop next to a UNIX/X box. Now I have a Windows box and a Linux box at home. I have always found that I almost exclusively use the UNIX/X box. The monopoly (at best duopoly) is real, and most folks haven't had my experience. I think it's clear that they're going to, and I think it's going to be enlightening for them when they do.
I'm working hard to make the Linux desktop experience better for everyone. But it's pretty darn good now. So good that I finally threw away twm a couple of years ago.:-)
13 garbage responses, followed by one last response which contains exactly the information the poster (and I) sought. Thank you,jrumney!
Gosh I love/.:-)
As a University professor with a goodly collection of published academic papers, I assure you that publishing in the academic world does not work like submitting to this "anti-cheating" service.
The typical agreement between an academic and a publisher gives an exclusive right to publish the copyrighted work to the publisher. These days, that exclusive right is often time-limited and/or limited to allow the author to self publish online. In any case, the publisher is almost never given the copyright itself, or given permission to go do arbitrary things with the work other than publish it in specified ways.
Note also that the author is giving the academic publisher the exclusive right to use the work in return for a benefit: the publication of the work. The "anti-cheating" service provides no such benefit to the student: they are being asked to give up their rights in return for the possibility of being falsely accused of plagiarism. Hardly a reasonable bargain. In fact, again IANAL but I think an excellent case could be made under contract law that there is no binding contract, due to no consideration to each side.
I would refuse to publish in a forum with a copyright agreement like that of this "anti-cheating" service; I share the concerns of the students in this area.
This is why there are Department Heads and Deans. Write a polite letter, and pay a lawyer $30CDN to review it. IANAL, but the letter might say something like: "By insisting that I provide my copyrighted materials to this service, UT assumes all liability for any use of my document for purposes other than plagiarism detection."
It's your copyright: in my non-expert opinion you can legally do this.
Then carry a copy of your letter to appropriate UT officials. Either they'll fix the prof's attitude problem right quick, or you'll have a lovely basis for an expensive lawsuit if something does go wrong in the future.
Amazing. Almost 100 words in the article on HOPE, without once managing to mention that it stands for "Hackers On Planet Earth", or give us "clueless" the slightest idea what it's about (a sort of social-minded hackers' conference with some relation to 2600 Magazine).
Until I started clicking on slow links, I assumed it stood for "HOtel PEnnsylvania", where it was being held...
C.f. "The Laser Cheese Raclette", Annals of Improbable Research 1(3) May/June 1995. Essentially, researchers used a steerable laser to melt the surface of a block of cheese to a precise, uniform depth. The result was reported to be tasty.
I distinctly recall from my childhood (30+ years ago) that the few "special" Lego parts we had were valued like gold. We used them for all kinds of things, and built amazing creations around them. My inner child heartily applauds giving kids a chance to acquire a pile of specialized parts to enhance their own designs.
Further, watching my 5-year-old play with Lego, he's not the least bit inhibited by the designs on the box. He builds the most amazing things, using the special parts however he wants. I don't for a minute believe he would be enjoying Lego nearly as much if all he had was bricks.
I'd look for Lego to expand lines like "Jack Stone" and "Oriental Adventure" to replace failed movie franchise lines. I suspect that the license for e.g. Harry Potter are so expensive they're bleeding the company dry. I'm also guessing that the Star Wars license is much cheaper.
That said, my boy has watched Chamber of Secrets and Sorcerer's Stone about 6 times each in the past 10 days. He builds all the characters in Lego, and then flies around on his plastic Nimbus 2000 pretending he's in a Quidditch match. Discontinuing Potter Lego is not going to be popular with him.
OK, I'm not getting why this article made the front page. The "tutorial" seems to consist of saying "download the software and install it", which shouldn't be too hard to figure out on one's own. The bulk of the tutorial content is pointers to four standard DOS games.
BTW, on Debian, the installation is "apt-get install dosemu-freedos". I was about to gloat about how easy that is, but it looks pretty darn easy under Slackware also.:-)
There's a highly insightful recent Matthew Scudder short story by Lawrence Block, "Batman's Helpers", about the private IP rent-a-cops who roust street vendors and confiscate their merchandise in NYC. The story has been reprinted widely; Google for details. I admire Block for tackling this obscure (to most) topic.
If you want to install Linux on your system, and Knoppix does what you want, there an HD installer on the Knoppix CD. I personally find Debian to be a quite usable Linux distro, although YMMV.
I imagine a GIMP 2.0 package will appear in Deb unstable shortly.
I honestly don't see the difference between an unlocked door and an open system.
If you think a system is open and it isn't, you don't bang your nose.
Seriously, analogies are often limited, broken ways of reasoning. Here's some key differences between physical doors and system "portals":
A portal is a door opening on every place in the world at once.
"Brute force" means something completely different for a portal. I can think of no reasonable portal analogy for attacking a door with explosives.
Users typically know which door they're trying to open. It is typically very difficult to build a fake door that opens to a different location than the user expects. The range of such possible spoof locations is quite small.
Portals typically have no "knob". Either they are open, or locked. There's no obvious notion of a portal that's "latched": a notion that's extremely useful in the physical world.
Most doors lack the kind of sophisticated keying in which every potential user receives a different key. In fact, doors that have this feature generally have electronic locks, i.e., portals.
You can't "public key" a door. Indeed, it isn't immediately obvious what that would mean for a door: the locking model is completely different.
One cannot instantly replace all the locks on all the doors one owns for free.
I could keep going, but perhaps you get the point. Analogies are only as good as what they are used for. Each of the above differences is relevant to the discussion of virtual crime. So next time you hear a "portals are doors" argument, think carefully about it. Is the analogy being used properly, or is it just a cover for specious reasoning?
Files from the filesystem are so 1990s. I want to be able to select arbitrary URIs, including http:, ssh:, and ftp: URIs. If it's file-like, and I can see it using some standard protocol, I should be able to stick it directly into my app.
Full drag and drop. Any object the GUI knows about should be drag-and-droppable into the selector. Again, if it's file like, and I can see it from the GUI, I should be able to stick it directly into my app.
Learning contexts/preferences. I want a pane in the dialog that shows me where the GUI thinks that I want to be, based on context and past behavior. I want more here than a "recently used" list, although that would be a good start. I want to start up a painting app I've never used before, and have it figure out that the settings from my old drawing app will mostly work, but with different default filetypes.
Keystroke/display mode. I want to be able to take all the junk off the dialog window, and just type globbed filenames as I would at the shell, and get some kind of continuous useful feedback in the dialog window.
My list could go on, but you get the point. A decent file dialog should be designed from scratch to match common requirements and usage patterns. For those who flat out have too many finger macros for some existing dialog box, provide a perfect emulation as an option. I, for one, would much prefer something that works better.
Yes, you can't have your privacy if it endangers the lives of those on airplanes.
Also, if you want to go into a movie theatre, or into a crowded shopping mall, or into the lobby of a tall building, or into a subway station, same deal. All of those are public places with a bunch of people who could easily be killed by bombs, nerve gas, guns, etc.
In fact, we've already seen Al Qaeda itself try to blow up the WTC by driving a truck full of explosives into the basement, which had no identity checks whatsoever. The plot almost succeeded, and folks were killed by the blast and damage. Thank goodness these dangerous terrorists couldn't get onto an airplane, where at least some ID checks were being performed.
Clearly, the only way to ensure our safety is to have mandatory fingerprinting upon entrance to any public place. What are we waiting for?
A couple of things here. First, most outside our community don't appreciate how truly malleable/replaceable our code is. It is quite possible that naive investors and even SCO believe that replacing the RCU code is a Big Deal.
Second, as long as the specific infringing code is unidentified, SCO can continue to allege that the RCU code is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg. And indeed they have. Again, investors and even SCO might quite possibly believe this.
If either of these things were true, the copyright infringement allegations would be a much bigger deal, meriting the attention and stock price jump they have received...
This is the strongest argument SCO has, and it will have to be fought by proving that RCU was developed independently of Dynix and Unix per se.
IANAL, but I think this is not the only option. There are two issues here: RCU patents, which SCO cannot claim AFAIK, and RCU copyrights. For the latter, the law fortunately allows remediation: if the offending code is immediately removed upon legal notification that it is infringing, SCO will have a hard time collecting any damages. Absent a patent issue, the OSS community can rewrite this smallish chunk of code from scratch in little time. SCO understands this, which is why it tried so hard to keep from identifying specific infringing code.
It all reminds me of Northern Light, a search engine that tried to do this stuff many years ago. Looks like the company is still in business selling its SW, but no longer provides general web search.
I tried NL for a while as my primary engine. I liked the categorization feature, but it didn't cover enough of the web space or provide enough extra-topical intelligence about relevance to provide terribly useful results. I gave up on it and went back to (IIRC) Altavista.
The moral of the story, IMHO, is that it is not enough to provide advanced search features. Competitors also must provide all the basics that Google got right long ago.
Calculations show that anything above 20 bit is simply not worth the effort - you won't be able to hear a single bit of difference anyway, the first 4 bit will be well below the noise floor.
Be careful how you do those calculations. Frequency domain methods, such as FFT and/or the human ear, can detect periodic signals well below the "noise floor".
Whether BT is faster for grabbing KNOPPIX depends on where you are. My office box is on the INET2 backbone, and I've found that grabbing from an INET2 mirror via HTTP or FTP is about 100x faster there than grabbing via BT. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, vaporware. Truer than you know. One of my classmates did her undergraduate physics thesis around the amazing properties of aerogels. In 1987.
Yeah, the concept of an "amateur liar" was cracking me up too. We all know who the "professional liars" are, but it's funny to think of "professional training" in lying. "The liar you are about to see is a trained and experienced professional operating under controlled conditions. Do not attempt to lie in this fashion at home!"
For a starting price of $5K, I expect 88 high-quality weighted pressure+velocity sensitive keys. Their actual keyboard looks like plastic garbage offhand, although I'd have to see one live to be sure. "Semi-Weighted Synth-Action Keyboard" probably means I'm right.
I'm not yet impressed: my $800 Fatar POS MIDI controller might be nicer to play. I plug it into a computer if I want it connected to a computer---computer runs Linux, too. MIDI rules.
I only care about one thing in my audio HW these days, and it ain't bandwidth and it ain't dynamic range. 16 bits + 22KHz is plenty for me.
I want tiny latency. Single sample, if I can have it. Think about it: at 44K samples/sec, that means that you now have about 50K CPU cycles/sample to process stuff. This should be more than enough cycles to get a word in off ADC, process it extensively, and get it back onto the DAC.
PCI adds incredible latency, and IRQ handling adds more. Give me an audio HW standard with a path that lets me grab a sample, process it, and stick it on the output before the next sample is due out, and I assure you Linux-based SW such as JACK will immediately take full advantage!
Why care? Two big reasons: (1) professional studios and musicians view this as a requirement for their audio tasks. As an amateur keyboard player, I couldn't agree more. (2) syncing audio, video, and other events is a billion times easier in this setting.
Big mandatory audio buffers are evil. Please make them go away, without making me buy $2K worth of Hammerfall products. In return, I promise to replace all my audio HW with HW using the new Intel audio standard.
KDE. :-)
I don't feel strongly, to be honest. It's nice to do the simple twm thing, but I wanted to consciously try to be more like "the rest of them" just to see how it was going these days. I found that KDE is no worse for most of what I do than twm, and I can communicate with and share my machine with my peers a bit easier this way. Besides, the eye candy is fun.
My 16MB P5/133 laptop still runs twm :-). But it won't really run a modern browser, either.
For me, the journey has been more like 20 years. I was running a desktop window system on a UNIX-like OS at home before there was such a thing as X (Smalltalk on LynxOS on a Tektronix Pegasus box).
I have to say that I think the folks who are all over the deficiencies of the Linux Desktop, and how we have to emulate the Windows/Mac/BeOS/Xbox/Sinclair/whatever desktop experience to have a usable desktop are mistaken. I think they underestimate the ability of users to adapt, and overestimate the degree to which familiar = better. For many years I had a PC or Mac sitting on my desktop next to a UNIX/X box. Now I have a Windows box and a Linux box at home. I have always found that I almost exclusively use the UNIX/X box. The monopoly (at best duopoly) is real, and most folks haven't had my experience. I think it's clear that they're going to, and I think it's going to be enlightening for them when they do.
I'm working hard to make the Linux desktop experience better for everyone. But it's pretty darn good now. So good that I finally threw away twm a couple of years ago. :-)
Let's enjoy the ride.
13 garbage responses, followed by one last response which contains exactly the information the poster (and I) sought. Thank you, jrumney ! Gosh I love /. :-)
As a University professor with a goodly collection of published academic papers, I assure you that publishing in the academic world does not work like submitting to this "anti-cheating" service.
The typical agreement between an academic and a publisher gives an exclusive right to publish the copyrighted work to the publisher. These days, that exclusive right is often time-limited and/or limited to allow the author to self publish online. In any case, the publisher is almost never given the copyright itself, or given permission to go do arbitrary things with the work other than publish it in specified ways.
Note also that the author is giving the academic publisher the exclusive right to use the work in return for a benefit: the publication of the work. The "anti-cheating" service provides no such benefit to the student: they are being asked to give up their rights in return for the possibility of being falsely accused of plagiarism. Hardly a reasonable bargain. In fact, again IANAL but I think an excellent case could be made under contract law that there is no binding contract, due to no consideration to each side.
I would refuse to publish in a forum with a copyright agreement like that of this "anti-cheating" service; I share the concerns of the students in this area.
This is why there are Department Heads and Deans. Write a polite letter, and pay a lawyer $30CDN to review it. IANAL, but the letter might say something like: "By insisting that I provide my copyrighted materials to this service, UT assumes all liability for any use of my document for purposes other than plagiarism detection." It's your copyright: in my non-expert opinion you can legally do this.
Then carry a copy of your letter to appropriate UT officials. Either they'll fix the prof's attitude problem right quick, or you'll have a lovely basis for an expensive lawsuit if something does go wrong in the future.
Amazing. Almost 100 words in the article on HOPE, without once managing to mention that it stands for "Hackers On Planet Earth", or give us "clueless" the slightest idea what it's about (a sort of social-minded hackers' conference with some relation to 2600 Magazine).
Until I started clicking on slow links, I assumed it stood for "HOtel PEnnsylvania", where it was being held...
C.f. "The Laser Cheese Raclette", Annals of Improbable Research 1(3) May/June 1995. Essentially, researchers used a steerable laser to melt the surface of a block of cheese to a precise, uniform depth. The result was reported to be tasty.
According to the article, the lead scientist is 82 years old. I think it's him.
Hah. And I mean that.
I distinctly recall from my childhood (30+ years ago) that the few "special" Lego parts we had were valued like gold. We used them for all kinds of things, and built amazing creations around them. My inner child heartily applauds giving kids a chance to acquire a pile of specialized parts to enhance their own designs.
Further, watching my 5-year-old play with Lego, he's not the least bit inhibited by the designs on the box. He builds the most amazing things, using the special parts however he wants. I don't for a minute believe he would be enjoying Lego nearly as much if all he had was bricks.
I'd look for Lego to expand lines like "Jack Stone" and "Oriental Adventure" to replace failed movie franchise lines. I suspect that the license for e.g. Harry Potter are so expensive they're bleeding the company dry. I'm also guessing that the Star Wars license is much cheaper.
That said, my boy has watched Chamber of Secrets and Sorcerer's Stone about 6 times each in the past 10 days. He builds all the characters in Lego, and then flies around on his plastic Nimbus 2000 pretending he's in a Quidditch match. Discontinuing Potter Lego is not going to be popular with him.
OK, I'm not getting why this article made the front page. The "tutorial" seems to consist of saying "download the software and install it", which shouldn't be too hard to figure out on one's own. The bulk of the tutorial content is pointers to four standard DOS games.
BTW, on Debian, the installation is "apt-get install dosemu-freedos". I was about to gloat about how easy that is, but it looks pretty darn easy under Slackware also. :-)
There's a highly insightful recent Matthew Scudder short story by Lawrence Block, "Batman's Helpers", about the private IP rent-a-cops who roust street vendors and confiscate their merchandise in NYC. The story has been reprinted widely; Google for details. I admire Block for tackling this obscure (to most) topic.
If you want to install Linux on your system, and Knoppix does what you want, there an HD installer on the Knoppix CD. I personally find Debian to be a quite usable Linux distro, although YMMV.
I imagine a GIMP 2.0 package will appear in Deb unstable shortly.
I honestly don't see the difference between an unlocked door and an open system.
If you think a system is open and it isn't, you don't bang your nose.
Seriously, analogies are often limited, broken ways of reasoning. Here's some key differences between physical doors and system "portals":
I could keep going, but perhaps you get the point. Analogies are only as good as what they are used for. Each of the above differences is relevant to the discussion of virtual crime. So next time you hear a "portals are doors" argument, think carefully about it. Is the analogy being used properly, or is it just a cover for specious reasoning?
Think larger! Here's some of my feature list:
My list could go on, but you get the point. A decent file dialog should be designed from scratch to match common requirements and usage patterns. For those who flat out have too many finger macros for some existing dialog box, provide a perfect emulation as an option. I, for one, would much prefer something that works better.
The Onion got this headline right over a year ago: American People Shrug, Line Up For Fingerprinting. Satire is hard these days.
Yes, you can't have your privacy if it endangers the lives of those on airplanes.
Also, if you want to go into a movie theatre, or into a crowded shopping mall, or into the lobby of a tall building, or into a subway station, same deal. All of those are public places with a bunch of people who could easily be killed by bombs, nerve gas, guns, etc.
In fact, we've already seen Al Qaeda itself try to blow up the WTC by driving a truck full of explosives into the basement, which had no identity checks whatsoever. The plot almost succeeded, and folks were killed by the blast and damage. Thank goodness these dangerous terrorists couldn't get onto an airplane, where at least some ID checks were being performed.
Clearly, the only way to ensure our safety is to have mandatory fingerprinting upon entrance to any public place. What are we waiting for?
A couple of things here. First, most outside our community don't appreciate how truly malleable/replaceable our code is. It is quite possible that naive investors and even SCO believe that replacing the RCU code is a Big Deal.
Second, as long as the specific infringing code is unidentified, SCO can continue to allege that the RCU code is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg. And indeed they have. Again, investors and even SCO might quite possibly believe this.
If either of these things were true, the copyright infringement allegations would be a much bigger deal, meriting the attention and stock price jump they have received...
This is the strongest argument SCO has, and it will have to be fought by proving that RCU was developed independently of Dynix and Unix per se.
IANAL, but I think this is not the only option. There are two issues here: RCU patents, which SCO cannot claim AFAIK, and RCU copyrights. For the latter, the law fortunately allows remediation: if the offending code is immediately removed upon legal notification that it is infringing, SCO will have a hard time collecting any damages. Absent a patent issue, the OSS community can rewrite this smallish chunk of code from scratch in little time. SCO understands this, which is why it tried so hard to keep from identifying specific infringing code.
It all reminds me of Northern Light, a search engine that tried to do this stuff many years ago. Looks like the company is still in business selling its SW, but no longer provides general web search.
I tried NL for a while as my primary engine. I liked the categorization feature, but it didn't cover enough of the web space or provide enough extra-topical intelligence about relevance to provide terribly useful results. I gave up on it and went back to (IIRC) Altavista.
The moral of the story, IMHO, is that it is not enough to provide advanced search features. Competitors also must provide all the basics that Google got right long ago.
Calculations show that anything above 20 bit is simply not worth the effort - you won't be able to hear a single bit of difference anyway, the first 4 bit will be well below the noise floor.
Be careful how you do those calculations. Frequency domain methods, such as FFT and/or the human ear, can detect periodic signals well below the "noise floor".
Whether BT is faster for grabbing KNOPPIX depends on where you are. My office box is on the INET2 backbone, and I've found that grabbing from an INET2 mirror via HTTP or FTP is about 100x faster there than grabbing via BT. YMMV.