"homo" might be short for homogeneous or homomorphic
For years, the word "homo" as an adjective usually meant "homogenized milk" in Canada. That meaning is slowly falling out of favour, but you can still go to the grocery store and see rows upon rows of 1- and 2-litre cartons in the cooler, all printed with the word "HOMO" in large block letters.
Because it's within the realm of possibility that something like this could be done. Not by the stupid RIAA, who can't even secure their own Web site, but by somebody a) more skilled and b) motivated to do something Really Bad, like build (and use) a gigantic DDoS network, or steal any kind of account/password info it can find, or any kind of documents which might contain proprietary information, etc.
True. But then again, the same thing could be said about any application you run. Even more so for those who run open source-based systems, I'd think. Freeware folks tend to "install and run" without much thought, assuming that they can catch any weird behaviour up front.
I'd imagine most Windows users now have at least cursory sandboxing for new apps. I'm assuming such behaviour is not commonplace among Linux or BSD users. The only thing that saves us is the concept of a privileged user (which doesn't help much in this case, but it will protect most binaries).
The open source culture is very trusting, in my experience. Maybe more so than the close-sourced world.
After all, most business applications work beautifully over citrix.
I guess mileage may vary. We abandoned Citrix/winframe years ago and never looked back. As a means of sharing or forwarding apps across an international VPN, it totally sucked^h^h^h^h^h^hrefused to work properly for this corp.
I could use stronger words to describe how much I dislike all Citrix products, but I've used the word "sucks" too much recently. My New Years resolution was to stop saying
What does this say about the amount of work that Apple's developers are putting into the apps that are supposed to be tempting over the Wintel crowd?
Er, nothing?
Seriously, dropping an Easter Egg into an app is usually pretty trivial. I mean, if you code with a certain amount of respect for the Model-View-Controller paradigm, an Easter Egg is just another View. An afternoon's work, and given the complexities of other stuff thqt iPhoto does, probably doesn't measurably impact on the final design at all. It ain't gonna affect the code freeze, QA and release milestones, that's for sure. If the argument is that the inclusion of an Easter Egg implies lower overal product quality, I respectfully disagree. From my experience, the presence or not of an Easter Egg is not any reasonable rulestick of overall quality.
Anyway, an Easter Egg is just something we do to make coding fun on slow days, and to sneak a pun or inside joke into the product. It's also a way I can get my mom to see that I really did work on that application. Though, really, there isn't any true reason my mom needs to run the app I work on. But there you have it.
Shouldn't be too hard to scare up resources. OpenBSD is free, and you have to know _someone_ who can loan/give you an old box.
I just thew away a P-90 and a DX4-something (sans hard drive) because I couldn't give them away. Otherwise I'd have said pay the shipping and they are yours. I have a 486 running OpenBSD that still boots (installed the day 2.7 came out), but it is acting as an endtable right now. I had the idea that it can be dropped into my network if the current router blows up.
Of course, if you do assemble your own router, you end up paying in time instead of money. It took me about 3 hours to get it up and running, and maybe a week to tweak it into shape. The maintenance since has been negligible. Just time for upgrades about once a year (OBSD upgrades are a dream), and a few critical patches between.
The Linksys (and others) NATting cable/DSL routers are sweet and require a lot less work to setup (unless they get cranky, and then you spend hours chasing down stupid things). They are also quieter and consume less energy, which is nothing to sneeze at.
But if cost is the breaking point, I can't recommend OpenBSD enough. It will run on seriously marginal hardware -- hardware that the major Linux distros just don't want to support any longer.
Oh, man. You really need to set up a proper router/firewall to share your DSL between the iBook and the XP box.
I know lots of folks who have got one of those dedicated DSL routers from Linksys, and they are all happy. Myself, I use an old P-133 running OpenBSD to share my cable connection among a stable of Macs (some are served via 802.11b) and the occasional Linux box.
Relying on XP to provided services will lead only to madness. Roll me in flame bait and hand me to the trolls, but I wouldn't trust any recent Windows OS as a server.
Two years from now, my Nomad Jukebox 5gb (c. 1956) will still nice-looking due to it's timeless design.
Industrial design is a funny thing. I'm not sure I agree that the "brushed-metal-look-plastic and primary colour bezel" look is any more valid (in the long run) than any other choice out there. It may depend on how one defines "timeless", but I'm not sure the current Creative or Panasonic designs are necessarily timeless. Of course, only time will tell.
Both are relatively recent takes on a look that has been around for some time. My first personal cassette player was a tiny Toshiba that was rounded-rectangular, brushed silver with black trim. Very iPod like for the time. That was close to 20 years ago.
Not to mention the creative also offers the NOMAD Jukebox Zen, which is aimed directly at the value-oriented would-be iPod buyer.
Creative is doing what most companies do: creating brand-recognition through design and style, while offering enough of a departure (read: copying other successful styles) to pick up the margin customers.
The easy answer is that, more than any other device, an iPod is marketed as a "lifestyle device".
The fact is people identify heavily with their grown-up toys, and the iPod market even more so, it appears.
My guess is that some money was thrown at researching this idea. I'm also guessing this kind of "indy" endorsement fits right in where Apple wants to position the iPod.
Heck, the way they market the iPod is almost right out of a book entitles "The Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank (of The Baffler fame).
It's like using your ethernet cable's plugability to be the ultimate firewall
While I appreciate the implication of such connectivity (some might say convergence), this statement is what I disagree with. There is, and can never be, anything as tight as the "ultimate firewall". Near ultimate/perfect maybe, but not perfect. It will always be hackable (which was not my main contention anyway) but, more seriously, pervasive tech like this never has a use until one is found for it.
Again, since I would never ask complete strangers for a ride uptown (regardless of the answers I may get) I don't see yet another device helping me much in that regard. Most urban dwellers spend a large part of their time avoiding interpersonal exchanges of any sort with strangers, no matter who depersonalized those exchanges may be. We ritualize these exchanges to the point of abstraction in most cases. I'm talking about how many meaningless and rote exchanges one makes taking a subway to work, getting a coffee and paper on the way, and greeting coworkers you don't actually work directly with on your way to the your cube.
If I was an investor being courted for such a device or system, I might invest some capital, but would remain solidly skeptical until a real application was demonstrated. I don't see a killer app for this technology right now (except maybe for porn or sex parties), and do not believe that being able to sell bootleg copies of CDs or asking for rides uptown (or whatever -- I'm being deliberately obtuse about the application) are that killer app.
Sorry, but I do not share any amount of enthusiasm for the possibilities. It's cool "geek chic" tech, to be sure, but it has to demonstrate it's ability.
Ironically, the best use will probably only be found once the tech becomes universally used by a chunk of the population. My beef was that I don't see any of the projections in the article as valid.
Nobody said you had to leave your pants turned on.
True. But then what is the point? The whole point of communication devices like this is that they are instant, pervasive and always-on. In fact, this was one of the salient points in the article. The intention is for computer-IM-cellphone tech to be ubiquitous and transparent.
Then you can set yours to "fuck off, I don't want to meet people."
Fair enough, though my initial reaction is "oh great, yet another place I have to filter out the noise to get to any kind of signal."
The wedding ring analogy is interesting, but no longer so accurate. Like any tradition it waxes and wanes over time. Many of my married friends didn't exchange rings. I certainly will not automatically do the ring thing if/when I get "married". Heck, even if I do get married, I probably won't be "married" (if you know what I mean).
Likewise, how this technology adds and changes to interpersonal traditions remains to be seen. Maybe it's because I work in the tech industry, but the less time I spend "connected" lately, the better I feel.
In that respect, I am certainly not "Joe IRC" (though admittedly an early adopter of most tech) so my opinion is just that.
Having a variety of interests and places to interact with other humans is not "133t", nor does it have anything to do with James Bond. It's normal and expected.
I was only speaking for myself, of course. If someone really finds a way to have this type of pervasive technology and communication actually work for them, then all the power to them.
I just don't see it working for me, and the decidely techy folks (we are all in the engineering or software biz) I hang with.
Speaking as someone who has lived and worked in some of the busiest urban areas in the world, my feelings are that most of us have already made all the "connections" we need.
Most of us spend our time deliberately ignoring each other, as even the smallest new interpersonal relationship can only offer so much in exchange for the necessary work.
Perhaps the article is meant to be more of a projection based on how the internet has change how we build relationships. Speaking only for myself, when I'm on my way home or to the office, the last thing I need is yet another social interaction with a stranger. Especially if this interaction is some banal eBay exchange or "hi want to chat?" ping. I already have enough places to meet people for commerce and dating, thank you very much.
Maybe the same folks who use IRC or instant messenging 24 hours a day will like this kind of anonymous mobile communication. Perhaps they will build fluid and mobile communities that move from area to area.
I just don't it fitting into my life, or anyone I spend time with.
Except a good chunk of native Apple apps are either untested on UFS, or specifically will not work on UFS (according to a few READMEs I've read lately).
For example, isn't Mozilla unhappy on UFS?
I suppose you can have an HFS+ partition for some apps, but this sounds like altogether too much work to me.
True enough. Jaguar made some real advances, and the raw ability seems to be there, but it is not exactly the happiest thing to configure.
I've managed to get my OS X boxes to talk to my UNIX server via SMB with proper authentication on a specific workgroup. I'm a pretty smart cookie, though, and don't mind trolling the web for answers, which I had to do.
There is certainly a lot of room for improvement, though. The best news is that SMB support in OS X is just Samba, which means it can always be figured out by anyone with a bit of time, and it can only get better. I haven't found a panic anywhere else in SMB, and I've excercised it pretty well.
I was able to cause a panic in 10.1.x by simply moving all files out of the root of an SMB share on a foreign host from the Terminal. I was able to duplicate at will, and did submit to Apple at one time.
No problem copying and removing the files from the terminal (using the same filespecs). Only the "mv" command would do it.
I have no idea of this was fixed in a later release of 10.1 or 10.2.
Re:Yeah.. I'll go see it...
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
favorite has to be the movie HARD BOILED
This was my introduction into Hong Kong gangster films done by a master of the oeuvre. Must be one of my all-time favourites. The show-down gun-battle you mention is truly beautifully done.
A must-see for anyone who digs Tarantino (though, of course, he had a wide range of influences). Highly recommended, as is The Killer.
The key to this type of film is that they must be extremely character driven, and we have to care about the characters (note the plural) while at the same time be made unsure of the main character's direction. As you say, this genre tends to be relatively plotless, or plot figures less than the dialog and character development.
Could a start a band called The Rolling Stones? Could Mick Jagger?
(I'll read this as "Could I start a band...")
Yes. No. Maybe. Popular music history is full of legal cases where present-or-former members of bands insist on using a currently used name. Sometimes there is a lot or recrimination, and sometimes not.
Names that spring to mind are Pink Floyd, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, The Charlatans [UK], Black Flag. In many cases the use of the name was tied up with the back catalogue, and required several years of litigation and an army of judges to sort it all out.
Boy, am I dating myself. I'll go back into my time machine now.
...there is a lot of scientific research involved in building and maintaining the station itself (like, for example, whou brought you Teflon?)...
Wasn't Teflon invented years ago for some non-space program purpose in the '70s? My understanding is that they couldn't make it stick to anything to make it useful, until the US military found a way to use it to coat the inside of rifle barrels.
Sounds like they are stressing that you aren't "locked-in" to a specific platform when you buy the hardware. The more choices they offer, the better they look.
Slashdot Mirror
For years, the word "homo" as an adjective usually meant "homogenized milk" in Canada. That meaning is slowly falling out of favour, but you can still go to the grocery store and see rows upon rows of 1- and 2-litre cartons in the cooler, all printed with the word "HOMO" in large block letters.
True. But then again, the same thing could be said about any application you run. Even more so for those who run open source-based systems, I'd think. Freeware folks tend to "install and run" without much thought, assuming that they can catch any weird behaviour up front.
I'd imagine most Windows users now have at least cursory sandboxing for new apps. I'm assuming such behaviour is not commonplace among Linux or BSD users. The only thing that saves us is the concept of a privileged user (which doesn't help much in this case, but it will protect most binaries).
The open source culture is very trusting, in my experience. Maybe more so than the close-sourced world.
Look more carefully. ^h is the "backspace key".
I guess mileage may vary. We abandoned Citrix/winframe years ago and never looked back. As a means of sharing or forwarding apps across an international VPN, it totally sucked^h^h^h^h^h^hrefused to work properly for this corp.
I could use stronger words to describe how much I dislike all Citrix products, but I've used the word "sucks" too much recently. My New Years resolution was to stop saying
- sucks
- it's all good
- believe it
this year. So far, so good.Er, nothing?
Seriously, dropping an Easter Egg into an app is usually pretty trivial. I mean, if you code with a certain amount of respect for the Model-View-Controller paradigm, an Easter Egg is just another View. An afternoon's work, and given the complexities of other stuff thqt iPhoto does, probably doesn't measurably impact on the final design at all. It ain't gonna affect the code freeze, QA and release milestones, that's for sure. If the argument is that the inclusion of an Easter Egg implies lower overal product quality, I respectfully disagree. From my experience, the presence or not of an Easter Egg is not any reasonable rulestick of overall quality.
Anyway, an Easter Egg is just something we do to make coding fun on slow days, and to sneak a pun or inside joke into the product. It's also a way I can get my mom to see that I really did work on that application. Though, really, there isn't any true reason my mom needs to run the app I work on. But there you have it.
Shouldn't be too hard to scare up resources. OpenBSD is free, and you have to know _someone_ who can loan/give you an old box.
I just thew away a P-90 and a DX4-something (sans hard drive) because I couldn't give them away. Otherwise I'd have said pay the shipping and they are yours. I have a 486 running OpenBSD that still boots (installed the day 2.7 came out), but it is acting as an endtable right now. I had the idea that it can be dropped into my network if the current router blows up.
Of course, if you do assemble your own router, you end up paying in time instead of money. It took me about 3 hours to get it up and running, and maybe a week to tweak it into shape. The maintenance since has been negligible. Just time for upgrades about once a year (OBSD upgrades are a dream), and a few critical patches between.
The Linksys (and others) NATting cable/DSL routers are sweet and require a lot less work to setup (unless they get cranky, and then you spend hours chasing down stupid things). They are also quieter and consume less energy, which is nothing to sneeze at.
But if cost is the breaking point, I can't recommend OpenBSD enough. It will run on seriously marginal hardware -- hardware that the major Linux distros just don't want to support any longer.
Anyway, you'll figure it out.
Oh, man. You really need to set up a proper router/firewall to share your DSL between the iBook and the XP box.
I know lots of folks who have got one of those dedicated DSL routers from Linksys, and they are all happy. Myself, I use an old P-133 running OpenBSD to share my cable connection among a stable of Macs (some are served via 802.11b) and the occasional Linux box.
Relying on XP to provided services will lead only to madness. Roll me in flame bait and hand me to the trolls, but I wouldn't trust any recent Windows OS as a server.
Industrial design is a funny thing. I'm not sure I agree that the "brushed-metal-look-plastic and primary colour bezel" look is any more valid (in the long run) than any other choice out there. It may depend on how one defines "timeless", but I'm not sure the current Creative or Panasonic designs are necessarily timeless. Of course, only time will tell.
Both are relatively recent takes on a look that has been around for some time. My first personal cassette player was a tiny Toshiba that was rounded-rectangular, brushed silver with black trim. Very iPod like for the time. That was close to 20 years ago.
Not to mention the creative also offers the NOMAD Jukebox Zen, which is aimed directly at the value-oriented would-be iPod buyer.
Creative is doing what most companies do: creating brand-recognition through design and style, while offering enough of a departure (read: copying other successful styles) to pick up the margin customers.
Who/what is this "Ad infinitum" you speak of? A new Techno/Trance DJ? A rapper? A nu-metal band?
Damn, why didn't I hear about them in CMJ magazine?
The easy answer is that, more than any other device, an iPod is marketed as a "lifestyle device".
The fact is people identify heavily with their grown-up toys, and the iPod market even more so, it appears.
My guess is that some money was thrown at researching this idea. I'm also guessing this kind of "indy" endorsement fits right in where Apple wants to position the iPod.
Heck, the way they market the iPod is almost right out of a book entitles "The Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank (of The Baffler fame).
What I'd really like to know is if Beck really signs his cheques with this same signature.
Imagine waiting in line behind Beck at the bank while he endorses all his royalty cheques.
"Sir, there's quite a line behind you, perhaps you's like to step aside?"
"Butterfly pecans in my suitcase. Greasy foundlings like a termite, choking on a splinter. Cold brains. A devil's haircut in my mind."
"Uh...?"
"Just one more curlicue."
"Oh."
Curses! I was going to make that clever post!
Mod the top post up. It's funny. Laugh!
While I appreciate the implication of such connectivity (some might say convergence), this statement is what I disagree with. There is, and can never be, anything as tight as the "ultimate firewall". Near ultimate/perfect maybe, but not perfect. It will always be hackable (which was not my main contention anyway) but, more seriously, pervasive tech like this never has a use until one is found for it.
Again, since I would never ask complete strangers for a ride uptown (regardless of the answers I may get) I don't see yet another device helping me much in that regard. Most urban dwellers spend a large part of their time avoiding interpersonal exchanges of any sort with strangers, no matter who depersonalized those exchanges may be. We ritualize these exchanges to the point of abstraction in most cases. I'm talking about how many meaningless and rote exchanges one makes taking a subway to work, getting a coffee and paper on the way, and greeting coworkers you don't actually work directly with on your way to the your cube.
If I was an investor being courted for such a device or system, I might invest some capital, but would remain solidly skeptical until a real application was demonstrated. I don't see a killer app for this technology right now (except maybe for porn or sex parties), and do not believe that being able to sell bootleg copies of CDs or asking for rides uptown (or whatever -- I'm being deliberately obtuse about the application) are that killer app.
Sorry, but I do not share any amount of enthusiasm for the possibilities. It's cool "geek chic" tech, to be sure, but it has to demonstrate it's ability.
Ironically, the best use will probably only be found once the tech becomes universally used by a chunk of the population. My beef was that I don't see any of the projections in the article as valid.
True. But then what is the point? The whole point of communication devices like this is that they are instant, pervasive and always-on. In fact, this was one of the salient points in the article. The intention is for computer-IM-cellphone tech to be ubiquitous and transparent.
And always enabled.
Fair enough, though my initial reaction is "oh great, yet another place I have to filter out the noise to get to any kind of signal."
The wedding ring analogy is interesting, but no longer so accurate. Like any tradition it waxes and wanes over time. Many of my married friends didn't exchange rings. I certainly will not automatically do the ring thing if/when I get "married". Heck, even if I do get married, I probably won't be "married" (if you know what I mean).
Likewise, how this technology adds and changes to interpersonal traditions remains to be seen. Maybe it's because I work in the tech industry, but the less time I spend "connected" lately, the better I feel.
In that respect, I am certainly not "Joe IRC" (though admittedly an early adopter of most tech) so my opinion is just that.
Having a variety of interests and places to interact with other humans is not "133t", nor does it have anything to do with James Bond. It's normal and expected.
I was only speaking for myself, of course. If someone really finds a way to have this type of pervasive technology and communication actually work for them, then all the power to them.
I just don't see it working for me, and the decidely techy folks (we are all in the engineering or software biz) I hang with.
Most of us spend our time deliberately ignoring each other, as even the smallest new interpersonal relationship can only offer so much in exchange for the necessary work.
Perhaps the article is meant to be more of a projection based on how the internet has change how we build relationships. Speaking only for myself, when I'm on my way home or to the office, the last thing I need is yet another social interaction with a stranger. Especially if this interaction is some banal eBay exchange or "hi want to chat?" ping. I already have enough places to meet people for commerce and dating, thank you very much.
Maybe the same folks who use IRC or instant messenging 24 hours a day will like this kind of anonymous mobile communication. Perhaps they will build fluid and mobile communities that move from area to area.
I just don't it fitting into my life, or anyone I spend time with.
For example, isn't Mozilla unhappy on UFS?
I suppose you can have an HFS+ partition for some apps, but this sounds like altogether too much work to me.
I've managed to get my OS X boxes to talk to my UNIX server via SMB with proper authentication on a specific workgroup. I'm a pretty smart cookie, though, and don't mind trolling the web for answers, which I had to do.
There is certainly a lot of room for improvement, though. The best news is that SMB support in OS X is just Samba, which means it can always be figured out by anyone with a bit of time, and it can only get better. I haven't found a panic anywhere else in SMB, and I've excercised it pretty well.
Look at me, being all positive on Monday morning!
I was able to cause a panic in 10.1.x by simply moving all files out of the root of an SMB share on a foreign host from the Terminal. I was able to duplicate at will, and did submit to Apple at one time.
No problem copying and removing the files from the terminal (using the same filespecs). Only the "mv" command would do it.
I have no idea of this was fixed in a later release of 10.1 or 10.2.
This was my introduction into Hong Kong gangster films done by a master of the oeuvre. Must be one of my all-time favourites. The show-down gun-battle you mention is truly beautifully done.
A must-see for anyone who digs Tarantino (though, of course, he had a wide range of influences). Highly recommended, as is The Killer.
The key to this type of film is that they must be extremely character driven, and we have to care about the characters (note the plural) while at the same time be made unsure of the main character's direction. As you say, this genre tends to be relatively plotless, or plot figures less than the dialog and character development.
(I'll read this as "Could I start a band...")
Yes. No. Maybe. Popular music history is full of legal cases where present-or-former members of bands insist on using a currently used name. Sometimes there is a lot or recrimination, and sometimes not.
Names that spring to mind are Pink Floyd, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, The Charlatans [UK], Black Flag. In many cases the use of the name was tied up with the back catalogue, and required several years of litigation and an army of judges to sort it all out.
Boy, am I dating myself. I'll go back into my time machine now.
Wasn't Teflon invented years ago for some non-space program purpose in the '70s? My understanding is that they couldn't make it stick to anything to make it useful, until the US military found a way to use it to coat the inside of rifle barrels.
You call that an anchor?
More choices for potential customers?
Sounds like they are stressing that you aren't "locked-in" to a specific platform when you buy the hardware. The more choices they offer, the better they look.