One thing that I just noticed that I like about the redesign is what happens when the display width is reduced below around 800 pixels. The fact that the right-hand sidebar disappears and is replaced by a left-hand button is a bit strange. That button should be on the right for consistency reasons.
I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.
1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish.... 2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site. 3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.
Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...
I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.
1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish.... 2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site. Look at this, I made three paragraphs and there's about an INCH of space between them! 3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.
Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...
I remember reading somewhere that there are processes in place for a patent submitter to deprecate a patent and forcefully render its content public domain. Am I remembering incorrectly? If not, then that would surely be a sign of goodwill as it would render the given content unpatentable.
Unfortunately I can't check this but your logic is correct only if the unit price charged by the electricity company is the same as that which they return to the customer in the case where the customer produced more electricity than they used.
set layout.css.visited_links_enabled to FALSE in about config
This will break (a tiny part of) the layout of sites that use CSS to change the style of links that were visited by the user, but it protects against this problem.
I don't understand this. There's a reasonably clear HIG document in GNOME which is continuously updated. The strict packing rules make the resulting interface flexible in regards to RTL languages and reasonably consistent with other applications. GTK+ has widgets for just about every purpose. Since the introduction of Cairo it is trivial to draw custom widgets, especially using the gtkmm and cairomm C++ bindings: the custom tab bar could be done in a day. With those bindings it is even quite easy to modify the behaviour of existing widgets by overloading their signal handlers, Murray Cumming and the others working on those have invested a great deal of effort to truly (and easily) expose the object system via C++.
And as a useful side-effect, those pesky testicles will shrink and get out of the way.
Re:Fix the intel graphics bugs yet?
on
Ubuntu 9.04 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with you that this issue seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the release engineers, who pushed the 2.6 driver through despite its downfalls. (apparently to gain support for some newer chipsets, which could've been simply backported by adding PCI ID's to the 2.4 driver)
Compositing and 3D performance are horrid and even non-composited 2D is slow when EXA is used. Apparently, if you're lucky you can switch to UXA, but it is non-functional on my systems. (G35: no modes found & i915: DRI disabled)
The issue can be improved (but not fixed) by using a backport of the version 2.4 intel driver available from the "http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu" PPA of siretart. This provides minor performance enhancements but is still slower than intrepid.
I have just acquired a hp tc1100 tablet and am happily using ubuntu on it. It does require a fair bit of configuration though.
1) ubuntu now comes with xorg auto configuration, you need to undo that and write a custom xorg.conf to include tablet support (plenty of guides out there)
2) you need to modify/etc/gdm/Init/Default to launch an on screen keyboard (OSK) so you can log in and/etc/gdm/PreLogin/Default to kill the OSK after logging in if you want to use another one for normal text entry. Also, you need to turn off the fancy login screen and use the plain one
3) get cellwriter and train it, it's good and comes with an integrated OSK
5) if you are using intrepid and have nvidia hardware, nvidia binary blob drivers will not work yet (nvidia has not updated for new xorg yet)
6) xournal is easily comparable to windows journal but requires a bit of fiddling to get the preferences just right. Also, it has drawing problems if you set your zoom level to anything BELOW fit to width
7) I use opera for browsing as the sidepane menu is so versatile. Also, it supports drag scrolling by setting the about:config options "scroll is drag"
8) evince unfortunately only supports drag scrolling using the middle mouse button and does not offer any way of configuring that. (bugs have been submitted though)
It would be interesting to see how much of the second-hand earnings goes back into buying new games. Of course, a second-hand sale means less business for that particular product but a healthy second-hand market could easily translate to more business overall.
I realise that most biometric systems use minutiae point templates, however, as another poster has pointed out, it appears that even this information can be used to reconstruct "prints" that will fool commercial readers.
Yes, but right now the fingerprint doesn't help you in comitting fraud. (other than placing them at a crime scene by faking them using those silicone tricks)
Now, however, it will be possible to produce a nice pair of fake fingerprints and fake ID to commit fraud, making it very very hard to disprove depending on the way the card works. If biometrics are stored on the card only, they become extremely easy to fake once you've broken the security features and the aforementioned proof problem becomes apparent. Also, the card does certainly not solve any of the problems it is supposedly designed for. As long as you have a consistent ID, fake or not, it will check out wherever it is tested.
If you have a central database, the cards are potentially safer because you have to modify/fake both card and database [entry], but there is a greater danger of data loss if the DB is compromised. Given the track record so far, compromising the DB will be a matter of infiltrating one of the contractors working on it.
How exactly is the fingerprint not readable if it, rather than just a hash, is stored on the card?
As for the RSA keys, governments, especially the British, have a very bad track record at keeping data safe. Keys of such importance are a very good target for a social or even technical attack. Knowing the track record, however, they will probably end up on some laptop, usb stick or cd forgotten on a public bus or train, sparing the attacker the effort.
And as to the forging, it may be harder to do it, but once you've done it (and it has been shown that biometric passports deployed in the EU are unsafe right now and can be compromised quite easily http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs ) it becomes very hard indeed to disprove that the person holding the passport is not actually the person referenced in the passport / on the ID card. The fingerprints match, the encrypted photograph matches, the RSA keys check out, perfect fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that I just noticed that I like about the redesign is what happens when the display width is reduced below around 800 pixels. The fact that the right-hand sidebar disappears and is replaced by a left-hand button is a bit strange. That button should be on the right for consistency reasons.
hmm, they seem to have fixed the paragraph issue
apparently
I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.
1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish....
2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site.
3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.
Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...
I've been a slashdot reader for a good 15 years now and I really hope that the new beta design changes substantially before being pushed to production.
1) FAR too much white space, only two or three stories fit on my screen! This is not Windows 8 and most of us don't have the attention span of a goldfish....
2) Titles have the same background as the story text. This makes it much more difficult to quickly skim the site. Look at this, I made three paragraphs and there's about an INCH of space between them!
3) The comment system has been thoroughly broken.
Launch a poll for the new design and see what happens...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Patent
Should have included this in the post.
I remember reading somewhere that there are processes in place for a patent submitter to deprecate a patent and forcefully render its content public domain. Am I remembering incorrectly? If not, then that would surely be a sign of goodwill as it would render the given content unpatentable.
Unfortunately I can't check this but your logic is correct only if the unit price charged by the electricity company is the same as that which they return to the customer in the case where the customer produced more electricity than they used.
The exploit maps 0x00000000 to userspace using pulseaudio, this prevents the segfault.
That workaround is a myth.
Interesting, testing it with firefox 3.5 on http://www.making-the-web.com/misc/sites-you-visit/nojs/ and http://www.making-the-web.com/misc/sites-you-visit/ it clearly works!
But you are right that it fails to provide protection with firefox 3.0.xx. Not sure about the 3.1 and 3.2 series.
in firefox:
set layout.css.visited_links_enabled to FALSE in about config
This will break (a tiny part of) the layout of sites that use CSS to change the style of links that were visited by the user, but it protects against this problem.
The Moblin 2.0 UI, for instance.
I don't understand this. There's a reasonably clear HIG document in GNOME which is continuously updated. The strict packing rules make the resulting interface flexible in regards to RTL languages and reasonably consistent with other applications. GTK+ has widgets for just about every purpose. Since the introduction of Cairo it is trivial to draw custom widgets, especially using the gtkmm and cairomm C++ bindings: the custom tab bar could be done in a day. With those bindings it is even quite easy to modify the behaviour of existing widgets by overloading their signal handlers, Murray Cumming and the others working on those have invested a great deal of effort to truly (and easily) expose the object system via C++.
And as a useful side-effect, those pesky testicles will shrink and get out of the way.
I agree with you that this issue seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the release engineers, who pushed the 2.6 driver through despite its downfalls. (apparently to gain support for some newer chipsets, which could've been simply backported by adding PCI ID's to the 2.4 driver)
Compositing and 3D performance are horrid and even non-composited 2D is slow when EXA is used. Apparently, if you're lucky you can switch to UXA, but it is non-functional on my systems. (G35: no modes found & i915: DRI disabled)
The issue can be improved (but not fixed) by using a backport of the version 2.4 intel driver available from the "http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu" PPA of siretart. This provides minor performance enhancements but is still slower than intrepid.
For simple tasks, even with big data sets, I've had good results with qtiplot http://soft.proindependent.com/qtiplot.html. For really complex stuff, there's root from CERN http://root.cern.ch/
I have just acquired a hp tc1100 tablet and am happily using ubuntu on it. It does require a fair bit of configuration though.
1) ubuntu now comes with xorg auto configuration, you need to undo that and write a custom xorg.conf to include tablet support (plenty of guides out there)
2) you need to modify /etc/gdm/Init/Default to launch an on screen keyboard (OSK) so you can log in and /etc/gdm/PreLogin/Default to kill the OSK after logging in if you want to use another one for normal text entry. Also, you need to turn off the fancy login screen and use the plain one
3) get cellwriter and train it, it's good and comes with an integrated OSK
4) configure your drivers to support RandR and use the script here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wacom_Serial_Tablet_PC_Stylus to enable rotation between portrait and landscape mode
5) if you are using intrepid and have nvidia hardware, nvidia binary blob drivers will not work yet (nvidia has not updated for new xorg yet)
6) xournal is easily comparable to windows journal but requires a bit of fiddling to get the preferences just right. Also, it has drawing problems if you set your zoom level to anything BELOW fit to width
7) I use opera for browsing as the sidepane menu is so versatile. Also, it supports drag scrolling by setting the about:config options "scroll is drag"
8) evince unfortunately only supports drag scrolling using the middle mouse button and does not offer any way of configuring that. (bugs have been submitted though)
I was referring to the sellers of said games reinvesting their earnings to buy new games.
It would be interesting to see how much of the second-hand earnings goes back into buying new games. Of course, a second-hand sale means less business for that particular product but a healthy second-hand market could easily translate to more business overall.
I realise that most biometric systems use minutiae point templates, however, as another poster has pointed out, it appears that even this information can be used to reconstruct "prints" that will fool commercial readers.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/34/4107554/04107560.pdf?temp=x
Yes, but right now the fingerprint doesn't help you in comitting fraud. (other than placing them at a crime scene by faking them using those silicone tricks)
Now, however, it will be possible to produce a nice pair of fake fingerprints and fake ID to commit fraud, making it very very hard to disprove depending on the way the card works. If biometrics are stored on the card only, they become extremely easy to fake once you've broken the security features and the aforementioned proof problem becomes apparent. Also, the card does certainly not solve any of the problems it is supposedly designed for. As long as you have a consistent ID, fake or not, it will check out wherever it is tested.
If you have a central database, the cards are potentially safer because you have to modify/fake both card and database [entry], but there is a greater danger of data loss if the DB is compromised. Given the track record so far, compromising the DB will be a matter of infiltrating one of the contractors working on it.
How exactly is the fingerprint not readable if it, rather than just a hash, is stored on the card?
As for the RSA keys, governments, especially the British, have a very bad track record at keeping data safe. Keys of such importance are a very good target for a social or even technical attack. Knowing the track record, however, they will probably end up on some laptop, usb stick or cd forgotten on a public bus or train, sparing the attacker the effort.
And as to the forging, it may be harder to do it, but once you've done it (and it has been shown that biometric passports deployed in the EU are unsafe right now and can be compromised quite easily http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs ) it becomes very hard indeed to disprove that the person holding the passport is not actually the person referenced in the passport / on the ID card. The fingerprints match, the encrypted photograph matches, the RSA keys check out, perfect fraud.
The source code is available.
Judging by the comparative table on the SRWare page, it does indeed.
I'm quite happy with runbox.com.
For working on smaller projects i find geany to be indispensable. It has a comprehensive project mode, document browser and a symbol tree.
http://www.geany.org/