> Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes!
You know, I was thinking about this very thing Monday evening, after downloading a 200-page document and trying to balance the need of marking it up vs the need of saving 100 sheets of paper.
We of the OS community who disapprove of MS Word as the near-universal medium of exchange should come up with our own document format, and show that the OS community is genuinely innovative by addressing issues such as this. It should be straightforward to represent documents as a "fixed" base document plus a "malleable" user-markup overlay. It would really be nice to be able to download some daunting documentation and mark it up with underlines, highlighting, margin notes, "yellow stickie" bookmarks, and the like, and have a reader app that let you do the markups as you go, but to always maintain the distinction between the original and the markups.
> It is an accepted historical fact that the Vikings settled Greenland, and then parts of eastern Canada as an outlying region from that.
Perhaps most interesting from the POV of the current discussion, is that although it is an accepted historical fact, it hasn't been so for more than a few decades. The story was common, but at least among school teachers and the like it had Roswell-grade credibility.
OK, to my "few decades" I suppose I must add whatever lag before knowledge of the archaelogical support trickles down to the schoolteacher level. But the point remains, that this kind of "knowledge" is still improving, so we may be in for some more surprises.
> While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code.... The problem was that the authorization code was always the same. In fact, according to the validation service's spec, the code was always '0000'. One could (and I did) build dummy HTML pages that simply sent the authorization code to the website, bypassing the validation service, and recieving all the goodies reserved for paying customers.
> Microsoft touting "Zero Administration" when Windows NT 4.0 came out. My boss was like "we'll save so much!!! I can't even project the numbers!"... tisk tisk. Good thing I told him to wait until the marketing hype died;-)
10-15 years ago the trade rags were full of blurge about "Fourth Generation Programming Languages" that would let even managers write their own programs (with the implicit promise that they could ditch their IT staffs).
Of course, at the time I worked for a boze who asked every month why the previous month's pounds ordered didn't equal its pounds shipped, and also frequently requested reports that included totals for things with different units of measurement, so I never felt very much threat from the promised PHBPL.
Re:What is NetHack?
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> Here's a picture of the main character @ And his dog looks like this d The orcs are quite good o
I've only ever seen the beginner's version, where the dungeon is a single 3x3 level and the only two characters are X and O.
> That was my point. Many times executives are not aware they get privaledged treatment. They wonder why people complain about Help Desk response time since everytime they call the Help Desk they get someone there within ten minutes.
Yeah, at my Uni there were always complaints about the campus shuttle bus service, and the clamor finally got so loud that the top adiministrators decided to "see for themselves" and arranged a date when they would all go down to a certain stop and wait for a bus. Can you believe it? A bus showed up almost instantly, and they therefore declared that there wasn't any problem.
My own experience was an expected 45 minute wait for a bus scheduled to come every 7 minutes.
When I see billboards around town suggesting a second phone line for internet use, I suspect the telcos' plan is to get lots of people addicted to having long internet sessions on their modem, after which the telcos will go running to Congress saying that they need to start charging local calls by the minute due to the excessive connect times in the Internet Age.
Why, why am I so cynical? Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted. I now return you to the scheduled rants...
> This isn't just ineffective. It will be counter productive: forcing the underground further underground...
Kinda makes you want to jerk a knee with "Prohibition" or "War on Drugs" tatooed on it, donit?
These laws probably aren't supposed to be effective. At best they are a cynical attempt to get votes by giving the politicians something to point to as "evidence" that they're Doing Something About It. At worst, they become another black hole for tax money, a source of corruption in law enforcement agencies, further erosion of our traditional liberties from the legislatures and courts, and a huge revenue boost to criminal organizations.
> What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?
Have you ever stopped consider how many times even a/.-reading g33k could get laid in three days, if everyone knew the world was going to end days hence?
(I have to conclude that astronomer-geeks don't have any trouble getting laid, or else they would be letting out false alarms now and then.)
> Funny, the Ultra/100 drive in my Redhat 7.2 box is using DMA by default:
I built a box and it worked fine too... until I changed out the motherboard, and then I had to go discover the stuff the author is talking about. It was very clearly enabled in the BIOS of the new m.b.; it just wasn't automatically picked up by Linux like it had been on the original m.b.
> Because the other Open Source OSes have already been patched, primarily because of the fact that they are open source.
Indeed; in this case we get a wonderful A/B comparison of the way OSOSes and CSOSes handle vulnerabilities. The comparison is rarely so exact, and thus rarely so revealing.
> MS is hosting an event here at Miami University (Ohio) in conjucntion with the CS department to celebrate the rollout of Visual Studio.NET tomorrow.
And ironically enough, there's currently a movement afoot to force "intelligent design" (crypto-creationism) into the biology curriculum in Ohio right now.
Sounds like their determined to screw two disciplines up.
> As other posters have pointed out this is a duplicate article. [slashdot.org] But hey, turn this repeat to your advantage! Go read the previous posting and repost all the +5 posts as your own, then watch the karma roll in!:)
Hey... didn't someone suggest that the last time we had a duplicate story?
> The question should not be who is responsible for insecure code but rather what can be done to discourage people from vandalism and how to track down and punish those who choose to break the law.
I agree, in principle. A similar concept applies to copy protection; we should concentrate on punishing theft rather than on limiting the fair-use capabilities of our electronics.
But in this case, I've been wondering whether society's best interest lies in a different strategy, more pragmatic if less idealistic.
I'm normally adamantly against blaming the victim for crimes, but consider this. What if we legalized hacking? Within a few weeks, incompetent sysadmins/secadmins would be out on the street. Within a few months, software that was not patched promptly would be replaced by software that was. Within a few years, software that was not essentially secure would be off the market.
Publishing the criminal is certainly just, but it doesn't do a heck of a lot of good to spank someone after the damage has been done. Society is going to be more dependent on computers in the future, and more at risk to insecure softare. We need to take radical action to fix the problem before it grows from inconvenient to devastating.
Admittedly this would cause a great deal of short-term disruption, but at least the problem would get fixed.
It's possible to build secure software; developers and vendors just have to care enough.
> If you throw out the ludicrous *theory* of evolution...
Here's betting that you don't know what the word "theory" means to a scientist.
> This Creator also "fast-forwarded" the geologic timescale to make it appear as if the universe was many years older.
No, I had a beer with him last week, and he told me that the geology was correct and it was the Bible that was faked. He had originally toyed with the idea of faking the geology just to have a joke at scientists' expense, but decided faking the book would make for a much better prank.
> [Ada] is not at all dead or outdated. It was updated in 1995...
And the '0X version is under development right now.
> Its even going to be included in the gcc tool chain in v3.1.
FWIW, about two weeks ago I downloaded gcc 3.1 from the cvs snapshot and tried it out. I didn't have time to download/run the test suite, but it worked fine on several of my programs which I did try out. IIRC, the 3.1 branch was supposed to fork off a week or so ago, and the target release date is only a couple of months from now.
Also notice that the GNU Visual Debugger is written in Ada. It currently works for Ada, C, and C++, but is designed to handle additional languages as plugins.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's target age group is obviously 13-16 or thereabouts
Probably describes most of the trolls here.
> it's nothing innovative or even particularly good.
We have a lot of Micorsoft fans here too.
> The plot is cliche to say the least and has been done better in several other novels available at your local library.
That part is to keep our editors happy editors happy.
See, the book has something for almost everyone on Slashdot. Except those overpriced UNIX gurus mentioned in the other article.
> Annotations are a given with paper-- just grab a pen and go to town. In the digital world, each and every software package needs to explicitly support annotations in order for this required ability to be present. So far as I know, no major PDF viewer allows one to take notes on it, so off to the printer it goes!
You know, I was thinking about this very thing Monday evening, after downloading a 200-page document and trying to balance the need of marking it up vs the need of saving 100 sheets of paper.
We of the OS community who disapprove of MS Word as the near-universal medium of exchange should come up with our own document format, and show that the OS community is genuinely innovative by addressing issues such as this. It should be straightforward to represent documents as a "fixed" base document plus a "malleable" user-markup overlay. It would really be nice to be able to download some daunting documentation and mark it up with underlines, highlighting, margin notes, "yellow stickie" bookmarks, and the like, and have a reader app that let you do the markups as you go, but to always maintain the distinction between the original and the markups.
> Things I don't enjoy about paper:
> + Backups can be difficult
I thought that's what FAX machines did. Where have all my FAXen been going?
...the Enron anthem had a surprise ending?
> It is an accepted historical fact that the Vikings settled Greenland, and then parts of eastern Canada as an outlying region from that.
Perhaps most interesting from the POV of the current discussion, is that although it is an accepted historical fact, it hasn't been so for more than a few decades. The story was common, but at least among school teachers and the like it had Roswell-grade credibility.
OK, to my "few decades" I suppose I must add whatever lag before knowledge of the archaelogical support trickles down to the schoolteacher level. But the point remains, that this kind of "knowledge" is still improving, so we may be in for some more surprises.
> While improving the code on a client's website, I became suspicious of the credit card validation code.
Hey -- you forgot to give us a link to the site!
> Microsoft touting "Zero Administration" when Windows NT 4.0 came out. My boss was like "we'll save so much!!! I can't even project the numbers!"... tisk tisk. Good thing I told him to wait until the marketing hype died
10-15 years ago the trade rags were full of blurge about "Fourth Generation Programming Languages" that would let even managers write their own programs (with the implicit promise that they could ditch their IT staffs).
Of course, at the time I worked for a boze who asked every month why the previous month's pounds ordered didn't equal its pounds shipped, and also frequently requested reports that included totals for things with different units of measurement, so I never felt very much threat from the promised PHBPL.
> Here's a picture of the main character @ And his dog looks like this d The orcs are quite good o
I've only ever seen the beginner's version, where the dungeon is a single 3x3 level and the only two characters are X and O.
> That was my point. Many times executives are not aware they get privaledged treatment. They wonder why people complain about Help Desk response time since everytime they call the Help Desk they get someone there within ten minutes.
Yeah, at my Uni there were always complaints about the campus shuttle bus service, and the clamor finally got so loud that the top adiministrators decided to "see for themselves" and arranged a date when they would all go down to a certain stop and wait for a bus. Can you believe it? A bus showed up almost instantly, and they therefore declared that there wasn't any problem.
My own experience was an expected 45 minute wait for a bus scheduled to come every 7 minutes.
When I see billboards around town suggesting a second phone line for internet use, I suspect the telcos' plan is to get lots of people addicted to having long internet sessions on their modem, after which the telcos will go running to Congress saying that they need to start charging local calls by the minute due to the excessive connect times in the Internet Age.
Why, why am I so cynical? Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted. I now return you to the scheduled rants...
> Same as before, or maybe less. Look around you. Would you want the sight of a naked
Surely you didn't think I was talking about getting it on with other
> This isn't just ineffective. It will be counter productive: forcing the underground further underground...
Kinda makes you want to jerk a knee with "Prohibition" or "War on Drugs" tatooed on it, donit?
These laws probably aren't supposed to be effective. At best they are a cynical attempt to get votes by giving the politicians something to point to as "evidence" that they're Doing Something About It. At worst, they become another black hole for tax money, a source of corruption in law enforcement agencies, further erosion of our traditional liberties from the legislatures and courts, and a huge revenue boost to criminal organizations.
> What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?
Have you ever stopped consider how many times even a
(I have to conclude that astronomer-geeks don't have any trouble getting laid, or else they would be letting out false alarms now and then.)
> Funny, the Ultra/100 drive in my Redhat 7.2 box is using DMA by default:
I built a box and it worked fine too... until I changed out the motherboard, and then I had to go discover the stuff the author is talking about. It was very clearly enabled in the BIOS of the new m.b.; it just wasn't automatically picked up by Linux like it had been on the original m.b.
> Because the other Open Source OSes have already been patched, primarily because of the fact that they are open source.
Indeed; in this case we get a wonderful A/B comparison of the way OSOSes and CSOSes handle vulnerabilities. The comparison is rarely so exact, and thus rarely so revealing.
> How can
It's part of their new strategy for obscuring duplicate stories.
> They prefer the term "a few wrinkles here and there"
"A feature with a few extra body segments."
> MS is hosting an event here at Miami University (Ohio) in conjucntion with the CS department to celebrate the rollout of Visual Studio
And ironically enough, there's currently a movement afoot to force "intelligent design" (crypto-creationism) into the biology curriculum in Ohio right now.
Sounds like their determined to screw two disciplines up.
> As other posters have pointed out this is a duplicate article. [slashdot.org] But hey, turn this repeat to your advantage! Go read the previous posting and repost all the +5 posts as your own, then watch the karma roll in!
Hey... didn't someone suggest that the last time we had a duplicate story?
Ooops -- they thought the red one was called Europa.
...Institute of Technology
> Publishing the criminal is certainly just
s/Publishing/Punishing/
> The question should not be who is responsible for insecure code but rather what can be done to discourage people from vandalism and how to track down and punish those who choose to break the law.
I agree, in principle. A similar concept applies to copy protection; we should concentrate on punishing theft rather than on limiting the fair-use capabilities of our electronics.
But in this case, I've been wondering whether society's best interest lies in a different strategy, more pragmatic if less idealistic.
I'm normally adamantly against blaming the victim for crimes, but consider this. What if we legalized hacking? Within a few weeks, incompetent sysadmins/secadmins would be out on the street. Within a few months, software that was not patched promptly would be replaced by software that was. Within a few years, software that was not essentially secure would be off the market.
Publishing the criminal is certainly just, but it doesn't do a heck of a lot of good to spank someone after the damage has been done. Society is going to be more dependent on computers in the future, and more at risk to insecure softare. We need to take radical action to fix the problem before it grows from inconvenient to devastating.
Admittedly this would cause a great deal of short-term disruption, but at least the problem would get fixed.
It's possible to build secure software; developers and vendors just have to care enough.
> If you throw out the ludicrous *theory* of evolution...
Here's betting that you don't know what the word "theory" means to a scientist.
> This Creator also "fast-forwarded" the geologic timescale to make it appear as if the universe was many years older.
No, I had a beer with him last week, and he told me that the geology was correct and it was the Bible that was faked. He had originally toyed with the idea of faking the geology just to have a joke at scientists' expense, but decided faking the book would make for a much better prank.
> [Ada] is not at all dead or outdated. It was updated in 1995...
And the '0X version is under development right now.
> Its even going to be included in the gcc tool chain in v3.1.
FWIW, about two weeks ago I downloaded gcc 3.1 from the cvs snapshot and tried it out. I didn't have time to download/run the test suite, but it worked fine on several of my programs which I did try out. IIRC, the 3.1 branch was supposed to fork off a week or so ago, and the target release date is only a couple of months from now.
Also notice that the GNU Visual Debugger is written in Ada. It currently works for Ada, C, and C++, but is designed to handle additional languages as plugins.