Re:Everything you know is wrong
on
Review: U-571
·
· Score: 1
OK, you're joking, but I'm going to take you seriously anyway...:)
It was in fact just the opposite: one of the first British breakthroughs was when they found a long encrypted message that had no "l"s (els) in. Because the one thing the Enigma machine *couldn't* do was map a letter to itself, they thought "maybe this message is just a long page full of the letter 'l'". Turns out they were right, and they could decrypt all the messages that were sent that day.
Why was there a message entirely composed of 'l's? Because the Germans had quotas to fill for messages sent, so someone just used up their quota:)
I don't really follow Trek that much, but I *loved* that episode (having for some reason also seen the original Trouble with Tribbles).
I think that only being able to use the original footage was most of the fun: they had to think of clever ways to integrate the dialog, and movements, etc... Just think, if they'd have had free reign, it wouldn't have been nearly as good!
I didn't look at words at all. There were very, very slight video "jumps" in the fakes: in the first one, it was about half way through, in the second it was right at the start. I don't think this was an artifact of RealPlayer, since the "real" shots were smooth.
Not too hard to spot if you're looking for it, even without comparing the real and fake shots. However, give the technology another, ooo, 6 months, they'll get it to be unnoticable.
I have to agree: for instance, the "adduser" program is written in perl. In order to set up a load of virtual hosts, with complicated permissions, I incorporated a hacked-around version of adduser to perform some of the tasks. No way could I have done that if it was written in C. Jeez..... Perl is great for manipulating all that stuff, and is easy to maintain with a bit of easily-obtained knowledge.
I think the main difference between the old Russian Ekranoplans (which were *amazing* to see in action) and this is that the Ekranoplans were inherently unstable. They had to have immensely sophisticated electronics to avoid crashing straight into the water.
I believe the reason why this reincarnation of them has been so long coming (since the technology was bought off the Russians well over a decade ago) was creating an entirely new design that was inherently stable. My hat goes off to them for managing it...
There's a thread over at www.macintouch.com that talks about a problem I used to have with Apple's "AppleShare IP" server software.
Sure, you can configure it not to be an open relay, but it only checks the "From:" line in your hostname. So any spammer can just say "yes, I'm johndoe@mydomain.com" and get a relay going. No way round it.
I soon switched to using sendmail on FreeBSD...
You're probably right, I think I was just trying to make the point that America isn't loved the whole world over as the land of the free. Sorry for any offence caused.
It would be really nice if research could be done, freely, across the world. If everyone leapt into America every time they wanted to {start a business|do some research|etc, etc} then America would be:
1. Overcrowded, and
2. Resented by the rest of the world for "stealing" all its talent.
I don't see that Africa is "cut off" from the rest of the world. They have phone lines to send e-mail down, and geographically Africa's a lot nearer to the rest of us in Europe than America is. Or do you think "cut off" simply means "cut off from America"? And anyway, if no-one else biult up their research facilities, that means all research ends up in America anyway, which is a Bad Thing(tm) (see above paragraph).
Personally I'd love to see these people being helped to do what they want, in a country that they feel is home. I sure as hell'd think twice before going to some states in the US if I were black.
Hope that wasn't an anti-American rant. I know my posts usually are...
"Between anticensorship and the desire to make money, the desire to make money will win out."
There seems to be some sort of shock factor the NYT is trying to get across. Personally I'm not surprised at all: I'd have assumed that *any* word could be substituted for "anticensorship" and it would still be true in the US, possibly several other countries too.
(NB: Not a troll, cf tobacco companies investing in companies that R&D cancer cures...)
although I'd love an intermediate step where some sort of biofeedback picked MP3s based on your mood
Ummm. Why is state of mind necessarily linked to state of body? Sometimes when I'm tired I want more soothing music, but then sometimes I want some serious jazz. Other times when I'm tired I want Beethoven. How is a computer supposed to tell the moods in my head when ostensibly my body is simply saying it's tired?
I hope swift justice comes for those who are resposible for this act of disgusting terrorism.
As long as it really is justice. I heard an American official say "we will bring them to justice, if not worse" on the TV yesterday. I mean, I understand that emotions are running high, but that kind of comment just makes me afraid America is about to do something stupid...
Wasn't the problem with Microsoft not that its router failed, but that every single one of their DNS servers was behind it? Now that *is* incompetence...
i guess Linus might be tryin to avoid a situation like NetBSD that runs on everything imaginable, but doesnt really doa good job on any.,.
That's not entirely fair! I've got NetBSD up and running beautifully on two old 68k Macs, running BIND, netatalk, ntpd, you name it. It seems extremely stable, and I wouldn't swap it for anything. (BTW, I tried to install Linux m68k, but it didn't support the ethernet card on one of the Macs.)
Just so I'm not completely OT, could I ask why, if NetBSD has avoided a fork, Linux couldn't avoid a fork?
I don't suppose many people here will ever have seen the man in action, telling us all how to cross the road. The funny thing is, he did 3 GCC "ads", and the first 2 were great: he was overdubbed. For the third, he just got too cocky, and asked for his own voice - it was a complete flop.
> MS does make some very decent Mac software (Office98 and IE 5))
Here I feel I should speak out briefly. There is a difference between having lots of useful features, and actually *working*. Both Office 98 and IE5 have excellent features that are to be found nowhere else, so I use them a lot.
However, little things can get in the way: create a large-ish Word document (over 10-15 pages), add a table, and it almost invariably screws up the document, even to the point ot crashing the computer. And IE5 *doesn't* send the "Refresh" command properly to a proxy - which is pretty fucking vital for a browser.
There are many more examples of this kind of behaviour in those 2 applications. MS can often have great ideas. But it's implementation is seriously fucked up.
I agree completely with nebular. This is probably the first Katz article I've actually managed to read without cringing with embarrassment.
Given (and it's a big if, I grant you) that doctors *do* start offering "perfect babies": Just think, for a minute, of parents who would have the mentality to try and have one. They would have to be pretty screwed up: some deep insecurity either about not wanting to go through the hardship they did, or about the world in general ("my kids have to be as good as possible or they won't get anywhere in life").
Now, forget acne, forget learning difficulties, forget everything like that. Seriously, one of the best ways to be a completely fucked-up kid is to have completely fucked-up parents. And if a parent thinks that they have a perfect kid, then everything that child does that *isn't* perfect will make the parents feel angry/insecure/both. "Godammit Jonny, practice your violin: we paid a lot of money for you to be able to play it!". You know what I mean.
I never, ever, want to meet a genetically engineered perfect man in a dark alley... I think they'd be too screwed up to be capable of *anything* useful.
I have a feeling HST took about 10-12 years to grind. OK, they got it wrong, but that's the time-scale we're looking at. Not sure about how practical that is in space.
"Cease and desist orders will be given, many will stop voluntarily, a few high profile people will refuse..."
Ummm. Many smaller sites will cease&desist *hyperlinking*? Good and valid points for other cases, but this one is just too big for the usual rhetoric.
BT have always been anti-internet: trying to shut down the free ISPs, not bringing out ADSL earlier (and when they do later this year, it'll be Windows only for a few months - and the adaptor is even USB-based, which the Mac first properly championed!), owning 2 out of the 4 ISPs they allow to offer unmetered access from BT lines (the regulator has said they must stop this practice soon!), the list goes on. BT are bastards, and should never have been privatised!
Just my tuppence...
- Oliver "exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
Re:I work at the Philips helpdesk. What about Euro
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
I heard it *only* affected the first CDD2xxx drives - later versions of the same model (if there is such a thing...) were OK.
Like I said below, mine kept on stopping a month or two after warranty ran out (on the original warranty, then 6-month ones from the people who "mended" it. Twice).
I bought a new internal HP CDRW (no mean feat given I have a G4!) only a fortnight ago after the CDD2000 conked out one last time. I really want some compensation from Philips.
(Sorry to keep posting the same stuff, it just seems relevant.)
Slashdot Mirror
OK, you're joking, but I'm going to take you seriously anyway... :)
:)
It was in fact just the opposite: one of the first British breakthroughs was when they found a long encrypted message that had no "l"s (els) in. Because the one thing the Enigma machine *couldn't* do was map a letter to itself, they thought "maybe this message is just a long page full of the letter 'l'". Turns out they were right, and they could decrypt all the messages that were sent that day.
Why was there a message entirely composed of 'l's? Because the Germans had quotas to fill for messages sent, so someone just used up their quota
I don't really follow Trek that much, but I *loved* that episode (having for some reason also seen the original Trouble with Tribbles).
I think that only being able to use the original footage was most of the fun: they had to think of clever ways to integrate the dialog, and movements, etc... Just think, if they'd have had free reign, it wouldn't have been nearly as good!
I didn't look at words at all. There were very, very slight video "jumps" in the fakes: in the first one, it was about half way through, in the second it was right at the start. I don't think this was an artifact of RealPlayer, since the "real" shots were smooth.
Not too hard to spot if you're looking for it, even without comparing the real and fake shots. However, give the technology another, ooo, 6 months, they'll get it to be unnoticable.
I have to agree: for instance, the "adduser" program is written in perl. In order to set up a load of virtual hosts, with complicated permissions, I incorporated a hacked-around version of adduser to perform some of the tasks. No way could I have done that if it was written in C. Jeez..... Perl is great for manipulating all that stuff, and is easy to maintain with a bit of easily-obtained knowledge.
I think the main difference between the old Russian Ekranoplans (which were *amazing* to see in action) and this is that the Ekranoplans were inherently unstable. They had to have immensely sophisticated electronics to avoid crashing straight into the water.
I believe the reason why this reincarnation of them has been so long coming (since the technology was bought off the Russians well over a decade ago) was creating an entirely new design that was inherently stable. My hat goes off to them for managing it...
That's called barratry [dictionary.com] and it's actually illegal
Do you get the feeling that's in the etymology of the word "barrister"?
and likewise "hate speech" certainly wouldn't belong in a ".prn" TLD (although it could be put under
Surely
There's a thread over at www.macintouch.com that talks about a problem I used to have with Apple's "AppleShare IP" server software.
Sure, you can configure it not to be an open relay, but it only checks the "From:" line in your hostname. So any spammer can just say "yes, I'm johndoe@mydomain.com" and get a relay going. No way round it.
I soon switched to using sendmail on FreeBSD...
You're probably right, I think I was just trying to make the point that America isn't loved the whole world over as the land of the free. Sorry for any offence caused.
I have to disagree with that...
It would be really nice if research could be done, freely, across the world. If everyone leapt into America every time they wanted to {start a business|do some research|etc, etc} then America would be:
1. Overcrowded, and
2. Resented by the rest of the world for "stealing" all its talent.
I don't see that Africa is "cut off" from the rest of the world. They have phone lines to send e-mail down, and geographically Africa's a lot nearer to the rest of us in Europe than America is. Or do you think "cut off" simply means "cut off from America"? And anyway, if no-one else biult up their research facilities, that means all research ends up in America anyway, which is a Bad Thing(tm) (see above paragraph).
Personally I'd love to see these people being helped to do what they want, in a country that they feel is home. I sure as hell'd think twice before going to some states in the US if I were black.
Hope that wasn't an anti-American rant. I know my posts usually are...
"Between anticensorship and the desire to make money, the desire to make money will win out."
There seems to be some sort of shock factor the NYT is trying to get across. Personally I'm not surprised at all: I'd have assumed that *any* word could be substituted for "anticensorship" and it would still be true in the US, possibly several other countries too.
(NB: Not a troll, cf tobacco companies investing in companies that R&D cancer cures...)
although I'd love an intermediate step where some sort of biofeedback picked MP3s based on your mood
Ummm. Why is state of mind necessarily linked to state of body? Sometimes when I'm tired I want more soothing music, but then sometimes I want some serious jazz. Other times when I'm tired I want Beethoven. How is a computer supposed to tell the moods in my head when ostensibly my body is simply saying it's tired?
The people at Stanford are mad! They produce a Linux version of the Protein folding program, but then go and call it "LinFAHxxx.exe"
:)
Evidently a bunch of Windows saps
(not a troll, honest)
Hey, you want to see some fun gates? Check out my homepage (http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/oliver/story/Antinomia lism.html).
It's a story about invisible logic gates that lose numbers. Lots of quantum stuff in there too!
I hope swift justice comes for those who are resposible for this act of disgusting terrorism.
As long as it really is justice. I heard an American official say "we will bring them to justice, if not worse" on the TV yesterday. I mean, I understand that emotions are running high, but that kind of comment just makes me afraid America is about to do something stupid...
Wasn't the problem with Microsoft not that its router failed, but that every single one of their DNS servers was behind it? Now that *is* incompetence...
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
Well, I only ever managed 150, but for all you Mac users out there:
The Humpage Pi Page
with CalcPi, a rather quick program that renders Pi out to as many places as you want.
Well, I like it!
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
Ah, now I knew NetBSD was a fork of FreeBSD, I never knew that OpenBSD came out of NetBSD. Oh, dear, I feel so ignorant sometimes.
Thanks for clearing that up.
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
i guess Linus might be tryin to avoid a situation like NetBSD that runs on everything imaginable, but doesnt really doa good job on any.,.
That's not entirely fair! I've got NetBSD up and running beautifully on two old 68k Macs, running BIND, netatalk, ntpd, you name it. It seems extremely stable, and I wouldn't swap it for anything.
(BTW, I tried to install Linux m68k, but it didn't support the ethernet card on one of the Macs.)
Just so I'm not completely OT, could I ask why, if NetBSD has avoided a fork, Linux couldn't avoid a fork?
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
I don't suppose many people here will ever have seen the man in action, telling us all how to cross the road. The funny thing is, he did 3 GCC "ads", and the first 2 were great: he was overdubbed. For the third, he just got too cocky, and asked for his own voice - it was a complete flop.
Just a 0.02 anecdote.
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
> MS does make some very decent Mac software (Office98 and IE 5))
Here I feel I should speak out briefly. There is a difference between having lots of useful features, and actually *working*. Both Office 98 and IE5 have excellent features that are to be found nowhere else, so I use them a lot.
However, little things can get in the way: create a large-ish Word document (over 10-15 pages), add a table, and it almost invariably screws up the document, even to the point ot crashing the computer. And IE5 *doesn't* send the "Refresh" command properly to a proxy - which is pretty fucking vital for a browser.
There are many more examples of this kind of behaviour in those 2 applications. MS can often have great ideas. But it's implementation is seriously fucked up.
And now back to the scheduled program...
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
I agree completely with nebular. This is probably the first Katz article I've actually managed to read without cringing with embarrassment.
Given (and it's a big if, I grant you) that doctors *do* start offering "perfect babies": Just think, for a minute, of parents who would have the mentality to try and have one. They would have to be pretty screwed up: some deep insecurity either about not wanting to go through the hardship they did, or about the world in general ("my kids have to be as good as possible or they won't get anywhere in life").
Now, forget acne, forget learning difficulties, forget everything like that. Seriously, one of the best ways to be a completely fucked-up kid is to have completely fucked-up parents. And if a parent thinks that they have a perfect kid, then everything that child does that *isn't* perfect will make the parents feel angry/insecure/both. "Godammit Jonny, practice your violin: we paid a lot of money for you to be able to play it!". You know what I mean.
I never, ever, want to meet a genetically engineered perfect man in a dark alley... I think they'd be too screwed up to be capable of *anything* useful.
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
I have a feeling HST took about 10-12 years to grind. OK, they got it wrong, but that's the time-scale we're looking at. Not sure about how practical that is in space.
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
"Cease and desist orders will be given, many will stop voluntarily, a few high profile people will refuse..."
Ummm. Many smaller sites will cease&desist *hyperlinking*? Good and valid points for other cases, but this one is just too big for the usual rhetoric.
BT have always been anti-internet: trying to shut down the free ISPs, not bringing out ADSL earlier (and when they do later this year, it'll be Windows only for a few months - and the adaptor is even USB-based, which the Mac first properly championed!), owning 2 out of the 4 ISPs they allow to offer unmetered access from BT lines (the regulator has said they must stop this practice soon!), the list goes on. BT are bastards, and should never have been privatised!
Just my tuppence...
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler
I heard it *only* affected the first CDD2xxx drives - later versions of the same model (if there is such a thing...) were OK.
Like I said below, mine kept on stopping a month or two after warranty ran out (on the original warranty, then 6-month ones from the people who "mended" it. Twice).
I bought a new internal HP CDRW (no mean feat given I have a G4!) only a fortnight ago after the CDD2000 conked out one last time. I really want some compensation from Philips.
(Sorry to keep posting the same stuff, it just seems relevant.)
- Oliver
"exp(i*Pi)+1=0" - Euler