It was a neat idea - get two guys in a stadium surrounded by odds and ends of electronics and Nipponese kitch, give em an hour to see what kind of mods they can come up with.
"Fuzui-san!"
"Go ahead!"
"Looks like he's going for a "change the LED's to pink" modification. Oh no! Some solder's dripped down the side and marked up his Bad Batdz-Maru clear case! That'll cost him points!"
But tell me, who was the "Aunty" looking guy in the robe with the eyeliner?
Cloaking is an interesting idea - it means that Script Kiddies can't notice that you're running OS whatever, and then do a search on the latest and greatest exploits available for same, including those that aren't fixed yet cause they've just been discovered.
It would mean you'd have to know what kind of system you're dealing with by knowing something, which would disqualify most of the nuisance attacks by the scripties out there.
I mean, many people who run Linux just kind of expect it to be secure out of the box, OK so what if they run everything as root, they can't use the sound card if they run as some user or other.
Cloaking is an interesting idea - it means that S
For political reasons as well, this might be useful - I mean, we see enough BSD vs Linux vs Windows flaming already...
Why are you "testing" whether you can get away with charging different people different prices?
If you're doing tests of your software, you do that internally. If you're doing that for marketing purposes, then you do it with focus groups. You don't treat your customer like a guinea pig.
And why test to see which discount level is accepted the most? We all know that people buy what is the lowest price, so whatever the lowest price you can give people is, is what they'll take.
If this was a test to see how subtly you could screw the customer, I propose a different test. How many people will click on http://www.noamazon.com and follow its advice over the whole 1-click and affiliate thing, as well as your latest interesting business practice?
You'll have a whole host of new devices to remove from certain parts of the anatomy of some people, when they refuse to shut up in public places shouting into yet another inanimate piece of plastic.
If you haul that thing out and start yelling "TELL ME WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO BE IN HALF AN HOUR!!!!" behind me in the movie theatre, the answer will be "IN TRACTION!!!!" and it won't come from the Palm.
I mean, we now have cell phones you don't have to talk to (you can type info into it so as not to get called Snookums at the next staff meeting!) and PDAs you do.
Life's too messed up.
How much to bribe the engineers on this to only allow them to understand people if and only if they adopt a REALLY silly accent, something like a Scotsman crossed with someone who learned Hindi in New England...
The Chaotes (I.O.T et. al) refuse to use the word "to be", claiming that things aren't, things DO. They consider that verb a virus, rotting away human potential.
Peter Carroll once pointed out that the word "grimoire" meaning spell-book derives from the same root as the word grammar.
Language itself, even, acts like a virus. You can't escape it, except to realise that you must deal with subtle programming.
"I am happy" OK, so if you feel unhappy, you wonder why you feel so, and until you recognise that you FEEL happy, as opposed to BEING happy, you cannot work on things that assist how you FEEL. People cannot define what IS (ask any philosopher) - they can only describe what DOES.
A side note - I actually went back and re-edited places where I used "to be" except for explicit references to the verb where needed.
Always, always, always analyze what you say and realise the implication of word choices you make. Even they can influence your perception.
Who is, and/or would admit to being a NON-serious competitor?
This is the TechMach 2200, a non-serious competitor to Nokia. I mean, we just put it together for a laugh, you know? I mean, sure, you could buy it, if you want one we'll try and find one lying around and send it to you.
Be interesting to see in the Olympics a guy just shuffling down the 100metres. The winnning time is 9.82 seconds, he gets there in about 45 seconds... "well, I decided to compete, but not seriously, you know? I mean I'm here, I would have liked to get a medal, and all, but I mean, I could never burn down the track like that, I mean, I'd snap a hamstring and barf if I even tried..."
Does this mean when things get out of control we're going to have to have a cybernetic Planned Parenthood, or be knee-deep in robotic Tribbles all over the place?
Problem is, you could technically support only the latest and greatest, but you ignore tons of legacy systems out there.
As for Unicode, I think their proposal to encode Klingon fonts in the standard whereas there are real human languages unrepresented is disgusting.
Expect a lot of misdiagnosis
on
Focusing Audio
·
· Score: 1
Is it schizophrenia or directed sound?
Mom, I hear voices. Voices inside my head.
Billy! Get off the garage roof with that spotlight thing, and stop pretending to be your dead Grandma! That's creepy!
There is no standard entry method for Chinese, no really standard way for encoding it, either. If you want to support Asian languages you have to support multiple input methods (Big5? GB?), multiple fonts (Simplified vs Traditional words?) et. al.
If you're interested, O'Reilly have written a book on Asian language processing - it's a really thick book, and it only deals with typing in and handling the 30,000 characters you need to deal with just to have a basic vocabulary. The ASCII character set can be memorized.
There is no substitute for blasting out text on an ASCII or ANSI terminal at 80wpm - trust me, you don't want to be reduced to typing wo3 bu2 shi3 etc. and selecting from a menu of five characters with a mouse every time you hit the space bar,.
Re:I don't know much about the politics
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
Hold up, tho. I'm not talking about tying QT to C++. I'm talking about having some kind of binary interface that both toolkits can interpret.
Surely there are bright people here who can figure out some way of writing a binary component that leaves implementation details (windowing etc) up to the toolkit???
I don't know much about the politics
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
But here is my $0.02.
With respect to GNOME vs KDE: I think having a truly open source desktop is the way to go. I like GNOME because it's open source, and also modular, in the sense that I can run Sawmill, Enlightenment, or whatever as my window manager.
KDE may or may not get around to letting you sub out window managers, excuse my ignorance, but that was two major keys for me. With tight and modular code, you could install WINDOWMAKER on a 486 with 2M memory, and GNOME+HELIX+ENLIGHTENMENT+NAUTILUS on the Godzilla machine, and tailor the level of what you install to what you want.
About Miguel being a King - there's two sides to every story, and for every autocratic leader of a volunteer group, there's always two to four people who want to be leader who whine and stamp and try and ruin it for everyone else. There's too much noise and not enough signal to make an objective assessment, but as far as I can tell, there needs to be someone in charge dictating at least a direction for any given project.
In terms of C++ vs C, it's BANG ON. Would someone please tell me why I have to say (excuse the spaces - they're an end run around the lameness filter) Gnome _ Please _ Give _ me _ a _ window ( (GTKWIDGET) & window), then Alright _ Then _Gnome _ set _ x _ value _ of _window _and _at _the _same _time _give _me _carpal _tunnel _syndrome(window, 20); ??? I understand that portability is the issue, but we could get really elegant, especially if we got around to some of the very interesting new features of C++.
And also, in terms of components, there MUST, repeat MUST be some commonality of this. I'd personally like to see both KDE 3 and GNOME 3 gutted and rewritten to have some common foundation in terms of interface, even if the toolkits are different, so that if I want to embed a KDE developer's Widget X in my GNOME project Y, I can.
And lastly, a damn good multi-desktop IDE would be nice. Code Crusader keeps segfaulting when I try to run it, and I can't get the proper version: I am NOT paying $100 to CodeWarrior for a wrapper to gcc, and I am neither going to run KDevelop and only have support for KDE in it.
is it that there are so many people who want to make money off computers without doing things with computers? If I had a buck for everytime I met someone who wanted to be a manager, or a "New Media Specialist" or whatever, I'd be rich.
If you want to be a historian, be a historian. If you want to be into computers, be into computers.
But some company isn't going to pay you a six figure salary plus options to be a computer historian. You want to basically do something liberal arty and useless, go work in academe, just like the six figure tenured academic who specialises in 15th century paper making techniques in Renaissance Florence, or the only person in the world who has an encyclopoaedic knowledge of medieval vexillography.
Yes math is hard. Yes you spend til 2 am coding sometimes. That's the way it is. Deal.
RE: I don't know why everyone thinks we want to talk to computers. I want to talk to my computer about as bleeping much as I want to talk to my television.
You've obviously never watched TV at the average American's house. HELLO, THE QUARTERBACK CANNOT HEAR YOU. HE'S MILES AWAY. Or seen people commenting back to the TV when something particularly obnoxious is on.
People talk to computers right now, you try being around here when something doesn't compile.
There will still be legacy parts of 16 bit DOS running within the 1024bit Windows 2010, which would mean the memory wouldn't be described as "segmented" as much as "diced".
Plugging my computer into my home doesn't sound like a good idea. I don't want to have to reboot my plumbing.
work on a spray that makes clothing invisible? I don't want to have to go and work at the airport or walk around with a special video camera in order to be able to see people naked.
That things have to be presented to suits (CFO magazine????) in suit terms.
Suits see concepts like freedom, customisable, etc and think "Oh, God, this is like in the 80s, when salespeople closed the deal with middle management, who, in order to get around the money-saving company policy of open bids, namely everyone bidding on what was agreed on, threw in some "couldn't get it anywhere but here, and from us" thing into the bid in order to ensure the business went to company X (but that product, not operable with anything else and exclusive, ended up costing us tons of money in the end!!!)"
The idea that Linux can deke and dodge to and fro scares someone with the mentality that if you buy all 50,000 as units of Dell Inspiron X's, no strangeness, no variations at all in all 50,000 machines, you can then make one boot CD and cut down on installation and maintenance costs.
They envisage instead of a fleet of taxis which can all be fuelled by gas pumps which can be bought in bulk, a fleet of heterogenous materials which then requires all refuelling areas to have gas, natural gas, diesel, gasohol, hemp oil, electric, solar power, etc.
Keep in mind that many an overworked IT department zigzags out of extra work by saying "we don't support X" or "if it isn't exactly to the corporate plan, we won't help out."
Management doesn't like having to buy extra support.
All this is why many of your ISP's all ask if you're using Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT, and, when you say "none of the above", tell you they don't support anyone but Windows and hang up. If you run Linux, BeOS, or whatever, then they can't just send you out the auto-run bootable CD with the software already set up on it. And in order to support these users, you need knowledgeable and therefore more expensive people, as opposed to someone with a Grade 11 education who can write down an address and send out a pre-configured CD.
The way to get the attention of a suit is to show them the hodgepodge of equipment sitting in piles in the corner and say "with this FREE product, that useless 486 is now a router. That bunch of Sparcs can see new life as a Linux cluster. You can also make THIS talk to THIS... etc."
Talk advantages!
NOTE: This rant isn't about anyone in particular in this story, it's just a rant I've been meaning to get off my chest for a long time.
Until we can get out of the kindergarten-like pi$sing matches that characterise anyone in a "scene", we're sunk.
There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with multiple languages, multiple toolkits, multiple libraries, etc. No one library, language, or whatever can do everything. Although I'm sure there's a sarky reply coming that C# is the best thing since sliced bread.
I'm not making any judgments about the people involved in this, but part of me really wishes that the whole "Qt people hate GNOME people, LINUX people hate FreeBSD people, Inti people hate GTK-- people" thing would stop.
Being "Lord High God" of a given project gives one a certain measure of prestige, sure. But shouldn't hackerdom be about skills, not who's got final signing authority over Project X. There's a HAPPY MEDIUM between anarchy and "well, if you aren't going to recognise my genius I'm going to go play somewhere else, and take my ball with me."
You see this in ANY crowd, from volunteer paramedics to Goths to football players to insurance salesmen.
Well, I'm 5'11, 220 lbs, can lift 300+, have won trophies in heavyweight kung-fu contact sparring (e.g. not points) competitions (open tourney) and happen to have had a childhood where I was a bit of an outsider, so I've had quite a few runins with people and groups of people who don't like people who are different. Yeah I grew up hacking and watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, but I hufted weights and learned to fight, too.
You're right, they rock.
Why did superheroes always have to be these lantern-jawed, so-sure-of-themselves, tights wearing steroid cases?
I think the idea of kindergarten aged girls who can kick ass is cool.
And besides, as characters go, they are pretty cool.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a neat idea - get two guys in a stadium surrounded by odds and ends of electronics and Nipponese kitch, give em an hour to see what kind of mods they can come up with.
"Fuzui-san!"
"Go ahead!"
"Looks like he's going for a "change the LED's to pink" modification. Oh no! Some solder's dripped down the side and marked up his Bad Batdz-Maru clear case! That'll cost him points!"
But tell me, who was the "Aunty" looking guy in the robe with the eyeliner?
Would ANYONE care about being able/not able to be messaged at any time by people on AOL?????
"I jist bot this computar - and I figuerd out how to maek lots of money with it. Jst send $1 to me and ad yoru naem to th botom of the list"
"WHAT'S THIS PROGRAM DO TEST TEST TEST TEST HELLO"
"Hey? Where's all the porn?"
etc
Sorry, Para 2 should have read
Cloaking is an interesting idea - it means that Script Kiddies can't notice that you're running OS whatever, and then do a search on the latest and greatest exploits available for same, including those that aren't fixed yet cause they've just been discovered.
It would mean you'd have to know what kind of system you're dealing with by knowing something, which would disqualify most of the nuisance attacks by the scripties out there.
I mean, many people who run Linux just kind of expect it to be secure out of the box, OK so what if they run everything as root, they can't use the sound card if they run as some user or other.
Cloaking is an interesting idea - it means that S
For political reasons as well, this might be useful - I mean, we see enough BSD vs Linux vs Windows flaming already...
Why are you "testing" whether you can get away with charging different people different prices?
If you're doing tests of your software, you do that internally. If you're doing that for marketing purposes, then you do it with focus groups. You don't treat your customer like a guinea pig.
And why test to see which discount level is accepted the most? We all know that people buy what is the lowest price, so whatever the lowest price you can give people is, is what they'll take.
If this was a test to see how subtly you could screw the customer, I propose a different test. How many people will click on http://www.noamazon.com and follow its advice over the whole 1-click and affiliate thing, as well as your latest interesting business practice?
You'll have a whole host of new devices to remove from certain parts of the anatomy of some people, when they refuse to shut up in public places shouting into yet another inanimate piece of plastic.
If you haul that thing out and start yelling "TELL ME WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO BE IN HALF AN HOUR!!!!" behind me in the movie theatre, the answer will be "IN TRACTION!!!!" and it won't come from the Palm.
I mean, we now have cell phones you don't have to talk to (you can type info into it so as not to get called Snookums at the next staff meeting!) and PDAs you do.
Life's too messed up.
How much to bribe the engineers on this to only allow them to understand people if and only if they adopt a REALLY silly accent, something like a Scotsman crossed with someone who learned Hindi in New England...
The Chaotes (I.O.T et. al) refuse to use the word "to be", claiming that things aren't, things DO. They consider that verb a virus, rotting away human potential.
Peter Carroll once pointed out that the word "grimoire" meaning spell-book derives from the same root as the word grammar.
Language itself, even, acts like a virus. You can't escape it, except to realise that you must deal with subtle programming.
"I am happy" OK, so if you feel unhappy, you wonder why you feel so, and until you recognise that you FEEL happy, as opposed to BEING happy, you cannot work on things that assist how you FEEL. People cannot define what IS (ask any philosopher) - they can only describe what DOES.
A side note - I actually went back and re-edited places where I used "to be" except for explicit references to the verb where needed.
Always, always, always analyze what you say and realise the implication of word choices you make. Even they can influence your perception.
Who is, and/or would admit to being a NON-serious competitor?
This is the TechMach 2200, a non-serious competitor to Nokia. I mean, we just put it together for a laugh, you know? I mean, sure, you could buy it, if you want one we'll try and find one lying around and send it to you.
Be interesting to see in the Olympics a guy just shuffling down the 100metres. The winnning time is 9.82 seconds, he gets there in about 45 seconds... "well, I decided to compete, but not seriously, you know? I mean I'm here, I would have liked to get a medal, and all, but I mean, I could never burn down the track like that, I mean, I'd snap a hamstring and barf if I even tried..."
Does this mean when things get out of control we're going to have to have a cybernetic Planned Parenthood, or be knee-deep in robotic Tribbles all over the place?
Problem is, you could technically support only the latest and greatest, but you ignore tons of legacy systems out there. As for Unicode, I think their proposal to encode Klingon fonts in the standard whereas there are real human languages unrepresented is disgusting.
Is it schizophrenia or directed sound?
Mom, I hear voices. Voices inside my head.
Billy! Get off the garage roof with that spotlight thing, and stop pretending to be your dead Grandma! That's creepy!
There is no standard entry method for Chinese, no really standard way for encoding it, either. If you want to support Asian languages you have to support multiple input methods (Big5? GB?), multiple fonts (Simplified vs Traditional words?) et. al.
If you're interested, O'Reilly have written a book on Asian language processing - it's a really thick book, and it only deals with typing in and handling the 30,000 characters you need to deal with just to have a basic vocabulary. The ASCII character set can be memorized.
There is no substitute for blasting out text on an ASCII or ANSI terminal at 80wpm - trust me, you don't want to be reduced to typing wo3 bu2 shi3 etc. and selecting from a menu of five characters with a mouse every time you hit the space bar,.
Hold up, tho. I'm not talking about tying QT to C++. I'm talking about having some kind of binary interface that both toolkits can interpret.
Surely there are bright people here who can figure out some way of writing a binary component that leaves implementation details (windowing etc) up to the toolkit???
But here is my $0.02.
With respect to GNOME vs KDE: I think having a truly open source desktop is the way to go. I like GNOME because it's open source, and also modular, in the sense that I can run Sawmill, Enlightenment, or whatever as my window manager. KDE may or may not get around to letting you sub out window managers, excuse my ignorance, but that was two major keys for me. With tight and modular code, you could install WINDOWMAKER on a 486 with 2M memory, and GNOME+HELIX+ENLIGHTENMENT+NAUTILUS on the Godzilla machine, and tailor the level of what you install to what you want.
About Miguel being a King - there's two sides to every story, and for every autocratic leader of a volunteer group, there's always two to four people who want to be leader who whine and stamp and try and ruin it for everyone else. There's too much noise and not enough signal to make an objective assessment, but as far as I can tell, there needs to be someone in charge dictating at least a direction for any given project.
In terms of C++ vs C, it's BANG ON. Would someone please tell me why I have to say (excuse the spaces - they're an end run around the lameness filter) Gnome _ Please _ Give _ me _ a _ window ( (GTKWIDGET) & window), then Alright _ Then _Gnome _ set _ x _ value _ of _window _and _at _the _same _time _give _me _carpal _tunnel _syndrome(window, 20); ??? I understand that portability is the issue, but we could get really elegant, especially if we got around to some of the very interesting new features of C++.
And also, in terms of components, there MUST, repeat MUST be some commonality of this. I'd personally like to see both KDE 3 and GNOME 3 gutted and rewritten to have some common foundation in terms of interface, even if the toolkits are different, so that if I want to embed a KDE developer's Widget X in my GNOME project Y, I can.
And lastly, a damn good multi-desktop IDE would be nice. Code Crusader keeps segfaulting when I try to run it, and I can't get the proper version: I am NOT paying $100 to CodeWarrior for a wrapper to gcc, and I am neither going to run KDevelop and only have support for KDE in it.
Please don't post racist trash to any thread to which I post.
I don't find your attempt at humor funny at all.
is it that there are so many people who want to make money off computers without doing things with computers? If I had a buck for everytime I met someone who wanted to be a manager, or a "New Media Specialist" or whatever, I'd be rich.
If you want to be a historian, be a historian. If you want to be into computers, be into computers. But some company isn't going to pay you a six figure salary plus options to be a computer historian. You want to basically do something liberal arty and useless, go work in academe, just like the six figure tenured academic who specialises in 15th century paper making techniques in Renaissance Florence, or the only person in the world who has an encyclopoaedic knowledge of medieval vexillography.
Yes math is hard. Yes you spend til 2 am coding sometimes. That's the way it is. Deal.
RE: I don't know why everyone thinks we want to talk to computers. I want to talk to my computer about as bleeping much as I want to talk to my television.
You've obviously never watched TV at the average American's house. HELLO, THE QUARTERBACK CANNOT HEAR YOU. HE'S MILES AWAY. Or seen people commenting back to the TV when something particularly obnoxious is on.
People talk to computers right now, you try being around here when something doesn't compile.
There will still be legacy parts of 16 bit DOS running within the 1024bit Windows 2010, which would mean the memory wouldn't be described as "segmented" as much as "diced".
Plugging my computer into my home doesn't sound like a good idea. I don't want to have to reboot my plumbing.
work on a spray that makes clothing invisible? I don't want to have to go and work at the airport or walk around with a special video camera in order to be able to see people naked.
Wait, Dragonballs are made by Motorola, aren't they??? Why would Intel be dumping them???
That things have to be presented to suits (CFO magazine????) in suit terms.
Suits see concepts like freedom, customisable, etc and think "Oh, God, this is like in the 80s, when salespeople closed the deal with middle management, who, in order to get around the money-saving company policy of open bids, namely everyone bidding on what was agreed on, threw in some "couldn't get it anywhere but here, and from us" thing into the bid in order to ensure the business went to company X (but that product, not operable with anything else and exclusive, ended up costing us tons of money in the end!!!)"
The idea that Linux can deke and dodge to and fro scares someone with the mentality that if you buy all 50,000 as units of Dell Inspiron X's, no strangeness, no variations at all in all 50,000 machines, you can then make one boot CD and cut down on installation and maintenance costs.
They envisage instead of a fleet of taxis which can all be fuelled by gas pumps which can be bought in bulk, a fleet of heterogenous materials which then requires all refuelling areas to have gas, natural gas, diesel, gasohol, hemp oil, electric, solar power, etc.
Keep in mind that many an overworked IT department zigzags out of extra work by saying "we don't support X" or "if it isn't exactly to the corporate plan, we won't help out." Management doesn't like having to buy extra support.
All this is why many of your ISP's all ask if you're using Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT, and, when you say "none of the above", tell you they don't support anyone but Windows and hang up. If you run Linux, BeOS, or whatever, then they can't just send you out the auto-run bootable CD with the software already set up on it. And in order to support these users, you need knowledgeable and therefore more expensive people, as opposed to someone with a Grade 11 education who can write down an address and send out a pre-configured CD.
The way to get the attention of a suit is to show them the hodgepodge of equipment sitting in piles in the corner and say "with this FREE product, that useless 486 is now a router. That bunch of Sparcs can see new life as a Linux cluster. You can also make THIS talk to THIS... etc." Talk advantages!
NOTE: This rant isn't about anyone in particular in this story, it's just a rant I've been meaning to get off my chest for a long time.
Until we can get out of the kindergarten-like pi$sing matches that characterise anyone in a "scene", we're sunk.
There's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with multiple languages, multiple toolkits, multiple libraries, etc. No one library, language, or whatever can do everything. Although I'm sure there's a sarky reply coming that C# is the best thing since sliced bread.
I'm not making any judgments about the people involved in this, but part of me really wishes that the whole "Qt people hate GNOME people, LINUX people hate FreeBSD people, Inti people hate GTK-- people" thing would stop.
Being "Lord High God" of a given project gives one a certain measure of prestige, sure. But shouldn't hackerdom be about skills, not who's got final signing authority over Project X. There's a HAPPY MEDIUM between anarchy and "well, if you aren't going to recognise my genius I'm going to go play somewhere else, and take my ball with me."
You see this in ANY crowd, from volunteer paramedics to Goths to football players to insurance salesmen.
Well, I'm 5'11, 220 lbs, can lift 300+, have won trophies in heavyweight kung-fu contact sparring (e.g. not points) competitions (open tourney) and happen to have had a childhood where I was a bit of an outsider, so I've had quite a few runins with people and groups of people who don't like people who are different. Yeah I grew up hacking and watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, but I hufted weights and learned to fight, too.
I'll put a Powerpuff sticker on whatever I want.
You're right, they rock. Why did superheroes always have to be these lantern-jawed, so-sure-of-themselves, tights wearing steroid cases? I think the idea of kindergarten aged girls who can kick ass is cool. And besides, as characters go, they are pretty cool.
This coming from a jurisdiction that allows child pr0n.
Can you not see the utter irony in this?
Something which is a fictitous bunch of pixels that resembles violence is verboten.
Photographic evidence of a crime against children is OK.