. . . have people with the expertise to actually check the MS Office source for security holes? Especially given how (probably) huge and internally messy that source code is? (The OO.o 1.1.2 source, which is probably on the same order of magnitude, is over 200MB--compressed.)
Yes the guy who found the card should attempt to find the real owner, what better way?
How about going through the proper channels, like the police? Some of you may not be aware, but in most places, the police also act as lost-and-found custodians--if you find a lost item, you turn it in, and they hold it for some period of time, during which the owner can go in and claim it. If the owner doesn't show up, then you can claim "finders keepers" and do things like this blog.
I'm truly amazed, that with all the modern science we have today, that we don't know the answer to this question.
And we still may not be getting it. All they've built is a robot that coincidentally can also move without falling over--there's nothing (at least as far as I can tell from the article) to say that it works the same way real insects do.
In all fairness, though, the question "how do animals move" is probably less important than "how can we get robots to move". While learning how the biological systems work can certainly provide insight, we don't have to exactly replicate those systems in mechanical robots, and in fact the optimal movement system for a robot may be different from that for an animal. It's sort of like emulating hardware: if you wanted to you could emulate a CPU down to the logic-gate level, but it's much more efficient to just re-interpret instructions into equivalent operations on the host CPU.
That's great and I agree with you but you've forgotten the X has a feature the already makes it superior to all other windowing systems. This feature is that you can give focus to window that is not on the top of the stacking order.
I haven't forgotten this; see my other response for why it's not good enough. In short, you still need enough screen real estate to show everything in non-overlapping locations. Translucency lets you overlap windows and still see everything.
As it happens, I already use fvwm, focus-follows-mouse, and do-not-raise-on-focus. Unfortunately, that has nothing to do with the issue of one window obscuring another. Try this:
Open up Mozilla (Firefox, Opera, pick your poison).
Maximize the window.
Pretend it's displaying a reference diagram that takes up the whole screen.
Open a source file in Emacs.
Try to edit the source file while looking at various different parts of the "diagram" window.
That's what I mean about translucency being useful. With translucency you don't need to touch the mouse at all.
If you declare a six figure income, the government will take 40-50% of it. But most people earning that sort of money can afford the services of an accountant who can give them advice on how to make six figures look like five.
Of course, this is actually accomplished by the accountant taking the sixth figure for himself . . .
Translucency means you can (for example) have an editor window open on top of a reference web site in Mozilla, and still read the reference information while working in the editor without having to repeatedly raise and lower the two windows. As a developer, anything that lets me focus more on what I'm actually doing and less on messing around with the interface is more than welcome.
To eliminate this functionality altogether would cause huge headaches
So what you do is make sure the PBX only announces numbers that actually belong to it. Come on, this is basic security stuff. It's not that hard to do (theoretically, anyway--but then egress filtering by ISPs also isn't hard to do and yet IP spoofing is still rampant, so who knows).
Hmm, then it could just be that I live farther from a tower (or that the Japanese cell phones use a different system, though minimum-power-necessary would make sense in terms of conserving battery power).
The handshake is broadcast at higher power (I presume) than the rest of the call -- and it would broadcast enough power into the speaker wire going between my PC and my amplifier that it was *very* audible in the music. *THUMP**THUMP*BzzzzzZzz* ring!
Actually, it's not that the handshake is done at higher power--it's that by picking the phone up, you're moving it far enough from the speaker/wires that the interference goes away. If you move the phone back near your speaker, the buzzing will come right back.
That's one I hadn't heard before, but no, it doesn't cover the entire range, either. It's something of a mix of that, "good luck", and "you can do it", with a dash of "I'm counting on you" thrown in for good measure.
The large number of pronouns ("I"=watakushi/watashi/boku/ore/jibun/..., "you"=anata/kimi/omae/sochira/...) is pretty commonly mentioned, but one example that comes to mind particularly is "ganbatte" (informal imperative of ganbaru, "to try hard", "to make an effort"). This is widely used in Japan as an exclamation of encouragement, but there's no direct English equivalent. The closest I've come are "good luck" or "keep on keepin' on", but both of those are only applicable in limited circumstances, whereas ganbatte is used much more widely. An American friend of mine who does translation here once called it the "universal panacea", which is as good a description as I've heard. When my parents were visiting Japan last summer--my mother with a bad ankle--we were climbing a long stairway at Toushouguu (Nikkou), and a Japanese lady coming down saw us and said to my mother, "Ganbatte!" I fumbled for words to explain it for about half a minute, and when the meaning finally got across we all had a good laugh--it's something of a running joke in the family now. (:
I'll admit that I've had precious few chances to speak English during my five years in Japan, which has probably not had a salutory effect on my ability to recall vocabulary during conversation. However, I'm not suggesting that it's not possible to express such concepts in English, just that to do so would require more effort than I (or the speaker in question) want to put into the conversation. To borrow the Korean example from above, the distinction between loosely-fitting and tightly-fitting cylinders can certainly be made in English--else it couldn't have been explained in the first place!--but if someone asks you "does it fit?", for example, do you want to go to the effort of saying "it fits but it's tight" or "it fits and it's loose", or just answer "it fits"? While perhaps not the best example, that's the kind of "trouble" I was referring to: when you have a concept you want to express but the target language doesn't have a simple way to express it.
Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.
Absolutely. And adults can "relearn" those distinctions, too; I found that as my Japanese studies progressed (started at 19, pretty close to native now) the range of things I was able to think about expanded considerably--so much so that now I sometimes have trouble speaking to people in English because English doesn't have a word for the concept I'm thinking about.
. . . in both senses of the phrase. This isn't particular to college life, but as others have pointed out, college dorms aren't among the most ideal (in terms of security) places to live--especially if, as is usually the case, you have to share your room. So:
Keep backups of your data, and keep them elsewhere. Your parents' place is a great option for this. If your most important data is small enough, you could even scp it somewhere nightly for safekeeping. Computer equipment can be replaced easily (well, apart from the money aspect); your data probably can't.
Plan what to do when your equipment is stolen or destroyed. No matter how well you prepare, nothing can protect your equipment 100%; in the worst case, all your alarms and trip wires aren't going to stop a raging fire. If you get through college unscathed, so much the better, but if something should happen, you'll be able to skip the "oh shit what do I do now" panic stage and get things back in working order.
As a corollary, don't oversecure your stuff. Naturally, you should take basic precautions like locking your door and keeping expensive stuff out of sight, but for anything above that, ask yourself whether it's worth the effort to install and monitor things like alarms or video cameras. If you have a laptop and you're worried about it, taking it with you is probably easier than finding all sorts of ways to secure it in your room. Spending all your free time worrying over whether your stuff is safe is definitely not a recommended way to spend your college years; hope for the best, plan for the worst, and get out and have fun!
. . . or, rather, misleading. It's not "ring tones" in the MIDI sense, but actual MP3 clips of songs that are the subject of the raid.
In Japan, anyone is allowed to make and sell MIDI-style ring tones as long as they pay a usage fee to the copyright office. This fee is then paid back to the original authors of the song--but not to the record labels. There are something like 200 companies producing ring tones now, and the labels get nothing out of any of them.
So when the next wave--ring songs, for lack of a better term; MP3 (or similarly encoded) digital sound--came around, the labels got greedy. Since they own the copyrights on the actual recordings, they decided not to let anyone but their own group companies sell clips from the songs. The Fair Trade Commission decided that this was unfair use of monopoly, and thus the raid.
I've suffered more frustration at the hands of Microsoft Office than I care to remember, but I'm still not seeing OO.o as a viable alternative--mainly because it's soooo frigging sloooooow. I have Win2k installed under VMware for the sole purpose of running Excel 95: it takes OO.o about 8x as long to load my ~4MB finance spreadsheet as Excel, and every time I try to make a change in OO.o the thing locks up for about 20 seconds(!).
I'm very much in favor of open source beating MSOffice, but it looks to me like the developers still need to do something about that "we write what we want, not what you want" mentality.
This is a damned bad sign. I know it's popular to bash on the media, but really, they're supposed to print objective fact rather than opinion. The fact that this article simply claims that P2P has damaged the music industry, rather than attributing it as an opinion of someone else's, says to me that we've already lost that particular part of this fight.
But if you think about it, file-sharing is damaging the music industry. Why? Because millions of people are discovering that they don't need to be slaves to the labels anymore. Issues of income during a particular year aside, the loss of control over their customers is serious damage.
The real danger is equating the music industry with the music scene. For a while, these were pretty much one and the same; the Internet is changing that, but as long as the RIAA can get people to believe that the welfare of music itself is dependent on the welfare of the industry, things aren't likely to improve.
They both upscale DVD's to HD resolution and output the unencrypted result over analog component cables.
I thought the only legal DVD video formats were 640(,704,720)x480 or 320(,352)x240, so it wouldn't make much sense to "upscale" those--you wouldn't get any better quality than the original SD video. Or are there DVDs being distributed in HD now?
There was an argument in a report I read recently that as the internet becomes more prevaliantthat studying as a whole will become less important as information will be avialable at your finger tips. The skills that will become more useful are the ability to search effeciently and work out which sources you can trust. Of course studying helps develop these skills but why should I remeber PI to 8 decimial places when I can look it up quicker?
Oh, I don't know, maybe so you don't make an utter fool out of yourself when you write to your significant other? Or, failing that (this is Slashdot;) ), so you can hold interesting conversations without having to go to Google every third sentence to find out what your friend is talking about?
I have been to other airports and even to another country... Japan in this case. Security wasn't all that different in Japan.
Then I can only assume the only flight you boarded in Japan was one back to the US. Japan is "cooperating" with the TSA measures as far as flights to the US go, but domestic flights are more or less the same as they were five years ago: no shoe removal, no random searches, no opening your luggage, no "only one carryon bag"--they make noises about it but I've never seen them actually stop anyone with multiple bags--no anything. To be honest, when I went to visit family for Christmas last year--the first time I'd traveled to the US since 9/11--I was taken aback at the "security" they forced on me, though the Japanese screeners were polite and apologetic enough to deflect my anger; the screeners gave the impression that they don't think much of the TSA's measures either.
This isn't hapless employees. This is government oppression, and the bans on free speech necessary to pull them off.
Censorship, tough laws, whatever, but if you're going to do business in a country then you'd damn well better get yourself familiar with the way that country works. As the oft-repeated phrase goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."
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. . . have people with the expertise to actually check the MS Office source for security holes? Especially given how (probably) huge and internally messy that source code is? (The OO.o 1.1.2 source, which is probably on the same order of magnitude, is over 200MB--compressed.)
Yes the guy who found the card should attempt to find the real owner, what better way?
How about going through the proper channels, like the police? Some of you may not be aware, but in most places, the police also act as lost-and-found custodians--if you find a lost item, you turn it in, and they hold it for some period of time, during which the owner can go in and claim it. If the owner doesn't show up, then you can claim "finders keepers" and do things like this blog.
I'm truly amazed, that with all the modern science we have today, that we don't know the answer to this question.
And we still may not be getting it. All they've built is a robot that coincidentally can also move without falling over--there's nothing (at least as far as I can tell from the article) to say that it works the same way real insects do.
In all fairness, though, the question "how do animals move" is probably less important than "how can we get robots to move". While learning how the biological systems work can certainly provide insight, we don't have to exactly replicate those systems in mechanical robots, and in fact the optimal movement system for a robot may be different from that for an animal. It's sort of like emulating hardware: if you wanted to you could emulate a CPU down to the logic-gate level, but it's much more efficient to just re-interpret instructions into equivalent operations on the host CPU.
That's great and I agree with you but you've forgotten the X has a feature the already makes it superior to all other windowing systems. This feature is that you can give focus to window that is not on the top of the stacking order.
I haven't forgotten this; see my other response for why it's not good enough. In short, you still need enough screen real estate to show everything in non-overlapping locations. Translucency lets you overlap windows and still see everything.
Two monitors!
In Japan, you don't have room for two monitors . . .
That's what I mean about translucency being useful. With translucency you don't need to touch the mouse at all.
If you declare a six figure income, the government will take 40-50% of it. But most people earning that sort of money can afford the services of an accountant who can give them advice on how to make six figures look like five.
Of course, this is actually accomplished by the accountant taking the sixth figure for himself . . .
Translucency means you can (for example) have an editor window open on top of a reference web site in Mozilla, and still read the reference information while working in the editor without having to repeatedly raise and lower the two windows. As a developer, anything that lets me focus more on what I'm actually doing and less on messing around with the interface is more than welcome.
To eliminate this functionality altogether would cause huge headaches
So what you do is make sure the PBX only announces numbers that actually belong to it. Come on, this is basic security stuff. It's not that hard to do (theoretically, anyway--but then egress filtering by ISPs also isn't hard to do and yet IP spoofing is still rampant, so who knows).
Hmm, then it could just be that I live farther from a tower (or that the Japanese cell phones use a different system, though minimum-power-necessary would make sense in terms of conserving battery power).
The handshake is broadcast at higher power (I presume) than the rest of the call -- and it would broadcast enough power into the speaker wire going between my PC and my amplifier that it was *very* audible in the music. *THUMP**THUMP*BzzzzzZzz* ring!
Actually, it's not that the handshake is done at higher power--it's that by picking the phone up, you're moving it far enough from the speaker/wires that the interference goes away. If you move the phone back near your speaker, the buzzing will come right back.
That's one I hadn't heard before, but no, it doesn't cover the entire range, either. It's something of a mix of that, "good luck", and "you can do it", with a dash of "I'm counting on you" thrown in for good measure.
The large number of pronouns ("I"=watakushi/watashi/boku/ore/jibun/..., "you"=anata/kimi/omae/sochira/...) is pretty commonly mentioned, but one example that comes to mind particularly is "ganbatte" (informal imperative of ganbaru, "to try hard", "to make an effort"). This is widely used in Japan as an exclamation of encouragement, but there's no direct English equivalent. The closest I've come are "good luck" or "keep on keepin' on", but both of those are only applicable in limited circumstances, whereas ganbatte is used much more widely. An American friend of mine who does translation here once called it the "universal panacea", which is as good a description as I've heard. When my parents were visiting Japan last summer--my mother with a bad ankle--we were climbing a long stairway at Toushouguu (Nikkou), and a Japanese lady coming down saw us and said to my mother, "Ganbatte!" I fumbled for words to explain it for about half a minute, and when the meaning finally got across we all had a good laugh--it's something of a running joke in the family now. (:
I'll admit that I've had precious few chances to speak English during my five years in Japan, which has probably not had a salutory effect on my ability to recall vocabulary during conversation. However, I'm not suggesting that it's not possible to express such concepts in English, just that to do so would require more effort than I (or the speaker in question) want to put into the conversation. To borrow the Korean example from above, the distinction between loosely-fitting and tightly-fitting cylinders can certainly be made in English--else it couldn't have been explained in the first place!--but if someone asks you "does it fit?", for example, do you want to go to the effort of saying "it fits but it's tight" or "it fits and it's loose", or just answer "it fits"? While perhaps not the best example, that's the kind of "trouble" I was referring to: when you have a concept you want to express but the target language doesn't have a simple way to express it.
Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.
Absolutely. And adults can "relearn" those distinctions, too; I found that as my Japanese studies progressed (started at 19, pretty close to native now) the range of things I was able to think about expanded considerably--so much so that now I sometimes have trouble speaking to people in English because English doesn't have a word for the concept I'm thinking about.
Microsoft Word 5 for DOS fit on a single floppy, and still does pretty much everything I need a word processor to do.
As a corollary, don't oversecure your stuff. Naturally, you should take basic precautions like locking your door and keeping expensive stuff out of sight, but for anything above that, ask yourself whether it's worth the effort to install and monitor things like alarms or video cameras. If you have a laptop and you're worried about it, taking it with you is probably easier than finding all sorts of ways to secure it in your room. Spending all your free time worrying over whether your stuff is safe is definitely not a recommended way to spend your college years; hope for the best, plan for the worst, and get out and have fun!
. . . or, rather, misleading. It's not "ring tones" in the MIDI sense, but actual MP3 clips of songs that are the subject of the raid.
In Japan, anyone is allowed to make and sell MIDI-style ring tones as long as they pay a usage fee to the copyright office. This fee is then paid back to the original authors of the song--but not to the record labels. There are something like 200 companies producing ring tones now, and the labels get nothing out of any of them.
So when the next wave--ring songs, for lack of a better term; MP3 (or similarly encoded) digital sound--came around, the labels got greedy. Since they own the copyrights on the actual recordings, they decided not to let anyone but their own group companies sell clips from the songs. The Fair Trade Commission decided that this was unfair use of monopoly, and thus the raid.
Office 2003 would run like a dog on your system as well.
Except that it runs just fine on my Celeron 1700--slower than 95, but still significantly faster then OO.o. Nice try.
I've suffered more frustration at the hands of Microsoft Office than I care to remember, but I'm still not seeing OO.o as a viable alternative--mainly because it's soooo frigging sloooooow. I have Win2k installed under VMware for the sole purpose of running Excel 95: it takes OO.o about 8x as long to load my ~4MB finance spreadsheet as Excel, and every time I try to make a change in OO.o the thing locks up for about 20 seconds(!).
I'm very much in favor of open source beating MSOffice, but it looks to me like the developers still need to do something about that "we write what we want, not what you want" mentality.
This is a damned bad sign. I know it's popular to bash on the media, but really, they're supposed to print objective fact rather than opinion. The fact that this article simply claims that P2P has damaged the music industry, rather than attributing it as an opinion of someone else's, says to me that we've already lost that particular part of this fight.
But if you think about it, file-sharing is damaging the music industry. Why? Because millions of people are discovering that they don't need to be slaves to the labels anymore. Issues of income during a particular year aside, the loss of control over their customers is serious damage.
The real danger is equating the music industry with the music scene. For a while, these were pretty much one and the same; the Internet is changing that, but as long as the RIAA can get people to believe that the welfare of music itself is dependent on the welfare of the industry, things aren't likely to improve.
They both upscale DVD's to HD resolution and output the unencrypted result over analog component cables.
I thought the only legal DVD video formats were 640(,704,720)x480 or 320(,352)x240, so it wouldn't make much sense to "upscale" those--you wouldn't get any better quality than the original SD video. Or are there DVDs being distributed in HD now?
There was an argument in a report I read recently that as the internet becomes more prevaliant that studying as a whole will become less important as information will be avialable at your finger tips. The skills that will become more useful are the ability to search effeciently and work out which sources you can trust. Of course studying helps develop these skills but why should I remeber PI to 8 decimial places when I can look it up quicker?
Oh, I don't know, maybe so you don't make an utter fool out of yourself when you write to your significant other? Or, failing that (this is Slashdot ;) ), so you can hold interesting conversations without having to go to Google every third sentence to find out what your friend is talking about?
I have been to other airports and even to another country... Japan in this case. Security wasn't all that different in Japan.
Then I can only assume the only flight you boarded in Japan was one back to the US. Japan is "cooperating" with the TSA measures as far as flights to the US go, but domestic flights are more or less the same as they were five years ago: no shoe removal, no random searches, no opening your luggage, no "only one carryon bag"--they make noises about it but I've never seen them actually stop anyone with multiple bags--no anything. To be honest, when I went to visit family for Christmas last year--the first time I'd traveled to the US since 9/11--I was taken aback at the "security" they forced on me, though the Japanese screeners were polite and apologetic enough to deflect my anger; the screeners gave the impression that they don't think much of the TSA's measures either.
This isn't hapless employees. This is government oppression, and the bans on free speech necessary to pull them off.
Censorship, tough laws, whatever, but if you're going to do business in a country then you'd damn well better get yourself familiar with the way that country works. As the oft-repeated phrase goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse."