Hmm, should we dangle a crystal over the official's hand too, and see whether it swings in a circle or a straight line? Maybe we ought to make sure the shape of his head isn't that of a probable criminal.
Many people are of the opinion that the polygraph isn't too far above some of these other methods. Personally, I'd expect it not to be very effective against politicians since most of them probably believe their own BS most of the time.
Maybe that's it - "10G capacity [assuming a 2:1 compression ratio for your MP3s; only has 5G "native" capacity but buy it anyway because 10 is a nice big number and only whiny nerds read these footnotes]".
an afternoon of experimenting, a halfway decent multimeter and a few trips to Radio Shack you can make a quality power supply for just about anything
This used to be true back when all power supplies were the linear "big brick of iron + 4 diodes" variety. However a proper switch-mode supply is not that easy to build (and Radio Shack is unlikely to sell the specialty transformers, high-frequency FETs, low-ESR capacitors, and inductor cores that you need; heck, they hardly even sell transistors these days).
You could do it with a few next-day deliveries from Digi-Key, an oscilloscope, an AC isolation transformer (to limit the damage when something fails on the "hot side" of the circuit), etc. However you might just end up paying the $$ for a nice Omron or similar industrial power supply. One with a UL/CSA rating too, so it doesn't start a fire that your insurance won't cover.
Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't build a power supply if you're interested in that sort of thing (and the ARRL handbook does have some good examples). Just make sure you're doing it because you want to do it, not just because you want to have a power supply.
I don't normally use the "NDEBUG" flag, and when I looked at the man page I guess I assumed that "assert(x)" would become "x" instead of "" when NDEBUG was on. However I just tested it, and it does indeed throw away the whole statement. Not the way I'd do it, but I guess the standards committee had their reasons (or were all in a hurry to take off for a long weekend...).
For instance, I know many "average" users who eject floppy disks and CD-ROMs from the drive while they are being read. Any Linux user who tries a stunt like that deserves a seg fault (or worse)
Well, an Amiga would give you a "You MUST replace volume < disklabel > in drive < device >!!!" if you ejected a disk while it was in use. It was a good reminder to the user that he had just done a Bad Thing, but the program could (usually) continue once it got the disk back. I don't think the application program even knew that this had happened; the read() call just blocked until the disk was put back.
If the OS isn't able to handle this sort of situation, the application program should get an EIO error on its read(). However this shouldn't translate into a segfault. Nothing should translate into a segfault - at worst an abort() if the program doesn't feel like recovering from the error.
Of course a "real OS" will just lock the CD-ROM or floppy drive [hardware permitting], thus preventing the user from ejecting a disk that's in use (unless the user has a paperclip, in which case he does deserve whatever he gets).
It's even easier than that - just use the built-in "assert()" macro. This is a good thing to wrap around any function call that "can't ever fail", just so that when it does fail, your program will terminate cleanly and tell you the location of the error.
(Insert standard Douglas Adams quote about things that can't ever go wrong)
The "right choice" eh? Tell me then, how come both the C64 and Amiga are dead?
The Amiga is dead primarily for marketing/mismanagement reasons, but also in part because it tied its OS very tightly to custom hardware. This gave it an early advantage, blowing almost everyone else out of the water in terms of graphics, sound, multitasking, etc. However it became a liability as time went on and the competing hardware improved - certain parts of the Amiga were still tightly tied to the old custom chipset. I do not believe that "inability to run C64 programs natively" was a significant factor in the ultimate demise of the Amiga.
As for why the C64 itself died, mainly just because it reached the end-point of its evolution, and the rest of the world moved on. It was an 8-bit machine, and that imposed certain fundamental limitations on it. Yes they could've clocked it up to 25 MHz, strapped on big-ass heatsinks, and added more and more bank-switched RAM, but it just wasn't worth it. Sometimes you have to walk away and start from a clean slate.
Nowadays, both the C64 and the Amiga can be emulated in software. I don't remember what capabilities the Amiga had for emulating the C64. Quite frankly, I didn't really care anymore after I had had the Amiga for a while.
Never mind the fact that even Linux is based on an initial x86 boot-process. (Though obviously it's not tied to it given it's multi-platform support).
One of the nicest things about using Linux on a non-x86 platform is that you often get to use a much more advanced bootloader. E.g. on the (now defunct) StrongARM-based Netwinder, you could do a diskless boot (TFTP+NFS), specify the name of the kernel image you wanted to run (dynamically, instead of having to put it in a conf and run 'lilo'), get full serial-console support, etc. Similarly for the Mac's "Open Firmware".
The only reason x86 Linux uses the "16 bit" cruft is because it has to.
As for the Windows market, they're moving to a "subscription" model anyway in order to get a more continuous revenue stream. Once consumers are in the habit of updating all their software every (x) months whether they need it or not, it becomes easier to switch the underlying architecture. You'd use a software emulator or 'virtual machine' model to support the "legacy" software. Sure it would slow down the old apps a lot, but that's what the manufacturers want anyway so they can sell you a new chip / application with 'go faster stripes'.
Interesting points about how all the registers are used... I've never actually been brave enough to get into x86 assembly. I have a Motorola background, so I'm used to things like a flat 4G address space, "data" registers and "address" registers, and memory-mapped IO. My brain just balked at the x86 world of "memory segments", "al/ah/ax/eax", etc.
Don't you think that we've hauled along the old 8086/XT baggage long enough? Do we really need a 64-bit 2GHz processor that can still run an MS-DOS 1.0 executable file, or that needs a multi-stage boot loader to crawl its way up the evolutionary ladder from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit "mode", accompanied by a BIOS that has 6 different ways to map a 400G hard-drive into a 1024x16x63 parameter space?
I feel that at some point the best thing to do is walk away from the old architecture and make a fresh start with a new one. Commodore did this when they went from the C-64 to the Amiga. Users grumbled for a while, but I think that in hindsight it turned out to be the right choice - once people began to exploit the capabilities of the new platform, compatibility with the old one became irrelevant. And there's always software emulation for those cases when you really do need to preserve the old stuff.
Note that I don't actually know how much "legacy" x86 code is in the Hammer, but even the article's little picture of the register structure makes be think the answer is "too much". Anyway, when did a lack of factual knowledge ever stop someone from ranting on Slashdot?:-)
I have trouble understanding why Slashot users are such haters when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs.
Here's my theory - it's because the good Apple stuff is priced just out of our reach. We love cool tech, but we hate cool tech that we can't have.
Of course some of the Apple stuff has just been too "cute" to be taken seriously (like the original "toilet seat" iBooks). However I have spent quite a bit of time drooling over stuff like the G4 Powerbook, G4 Cube, and even the old NeXT (not strictly an Apple product, but close enough).
Note that I'm not an Apple-hater. I am very happy with my iBook2, and I agree with you that it's a real pleasure to see a company for whom "innovation" actually means something. I'll trade a few% of raw CPU speed for some good engineering design any day.
No, that's acutally correct. To speed up, you slow down (and conversely).
It has to do with kinetic and potential energy. For simplicity, assume circular orbits. The potential energy of an orbit is defined to be zero at an infinite orbital radius, and it becomes more negative as your radius shrinks.
Kinetic energy is positive, and is related to how fast you're going. For a circular orbit this turns out to be (IIRC) exactly -1/2 of the potential energy. So the total energy of an orbiting body is (KE + PE) = ((-1/2 * PE) + PE) = PE/2 (which is still a negative quantity).
Now when a body loses energy through aerobraking friction, its total energy decreases. This means that its potential energy decreases but its kinetic energy (therefore its speed) increases.
[Hope I got that right. It's been a while since I had to do this stuff]
Re:Please inact a subscription service!
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
Oh, yeah, excellent idea. The higher your karma, the fewer/smaller your ads are.
I wasn't thinking of a "state"-based system: if (Karma > 40) then no_adds; else if (Karma > 20) then some_adds; else spam_you_ragged;, although that could work too.
I was thinking that you would "spend" some of your Karma to be free of ads for a block of time (just like you'd get by paying a cash subscription fee). Karma becomes largely meaningless once you hit +50 (though it still irks me when I get a comment modded to +5 then down to +4 overrated, and end up with a net -1 karma loss, but that's another rant). If Karma could be spent each month to pay for an ad-free subscription, it would give people an incentive to keep creating valuable content.
Yes there are drawbacks. It might encourage "karma whoring", though that's more an issue with the moderation system and what the moderators choose to reward. Also, some jurisdictions would probably consider the Karma points to be "taxable income"...
Firstly, congratulations on winning this week's 'useless cat' award - in cases like this, you should redirect stdin on the second command instead of running an unnecessary 'cat'. Like this:
kill </bin/laden
[And to bring this post somewhat on-topic, how about a Slashdot Enhancement so that a "Plain Old Text" comment will actually recognize a '<' character as a '<' instead of making me write it as '& lt'?]
Secondly, the best version of this I've seen is:
chmod a+x/bin/laden
(That's "make/bin/laden executable by all" for you non-Unix folks).
Re:Please inact a subscription service!
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think that users should be able to "pay" for their subscription fees with Karma points instead of cash (or some combination thereof). E.g. each Karma point could be worth 1/10 of the monthly fee.
Most of the value of slashdot is in the user comments, and I think it is only fair to give a "free ride" to those who contribute the most highly rated content.
Also, people who were bored with sitting at the +50 cap would have a way to reduce their Karma other than resorting to a week-long trolling spree.:-)
Personally, I don't think they went far enough. We still got way too many useless letters in there. I mean, what the hell is 'c' for? Or 'x' or 'q' for that matter?
%% (fortunes)
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Dual boot between Mac OS and YDL2 is a breeze (pre OS X, at least-- I've seen some list traffic that indicates care is required with OS X).
I have an iBook2 with YDL2.0.
Whenever I switch the Mac startup preference between OS9 and OSX, it overwrites the boot setting so that the machine will bypass the yaboot loader and go directly to Mac every time. To correct it I have to go into the Open Firmware screen and change the boot-device variable to point back at the yaboot partition. It's not a huge bother because I don't use the Mac side very often, and when I do I normally stay in OSX.
There's a free tool to de-obfuscate the headers of Spam and send complaint letters to the appropriate abuse departments. They also have a paid filtering service that will hold any possible spam messages until you manually approve the sender (or report it as spam). Money well spent, IMHO.
Spam should be legal, as long as they include a valid return addy, and have a way to remove people (for real)
As for the valid return address, I would say this is necessary (but not sufficient) for a Spam to be "legal" in any sense (along with "ADV:" in the subject line, other standard headers to identify it as spam, and a notification of how they got my email address so that I can badger / LART the upstream company to stop selling my info).
However, the "remove" method doesn't really work because these addresses are often just a way to verify that your address is still "live". One way to test this is to send a removal request using a newly-created address, then wait to start receiving spam on that address.
The only way for "opt-out" to actually work is to have a higher-level, trusted agency maintain the opt-out list (similar to "do-not-call" lists that exist for telemarketing agencies). However, given the nature of the Internet, it's hard to say what agencies should have jurisdiction here.
Of course, the best way to deal with spammers involves a jar of honey and an anthill...
That won't be an issue if you're programming for a higher-level target (Linux, POSIX, KDE, etc) - develop the code on the iBook, then just re-compile it on an x86 box when you need to create a production release. I did this with my last project, and it worked quite well.
There's another advantage - when you build your code on multiple platforms, you are more likely to find some types of bug (e.g. those that make assumptions about byte ordering or structure padding).
I think the iBook is a great little platform. The Apple claims of "up to 5 hours" seem a bit optimistic, but it does have very good battery life.
Perhaps what's needed is a USB dongle, with an external switch that fries the flash RAM inside, rendering it unusable, and unreadable even to people trained in data recovery.
Well, there's the Dallas Semiconductor iButton. It includes tamper-resistant features that will zero its RAM under certain conditions (e.g. over-temperature), although it doesn't have an actual "erase" switch.
The Canadian governemnt has asked for public comments on proposed (DMCA-style) changes to our copyright law. Although the deadline for initial submissions was September 15, you have until October 22 to make comments on those submissions.
Don't let the Canadian governemnt rubber-stamp the content industry's wishlist! Get your comments in while you can.
So how long...
on
GPS Drawings
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· Score: 4, Funny
So how long until one of the slashdot trolls starts posting a GPS drawing of that goatse guy?
9) Repeat steps 5 through 8 until they understand that sometimes it is necessary to punch back.
You set up a very artificial scenario. The military person is almost certainly much better at hand-to-hand combat than the student. Even if the student punches back, he probably won't be able to incapacitate the military person. So why would the student think that punching back would stop further attacks, rather than escalating the intensity of those further attacks???
The only reason that "punching back" stops the violence is that the attacker's only goal is to incite the student to punch back. With more likely attack goals (trying to get your lunch money, doesn't like the color of your skin, etc) punching back will only stop the violence if you are strong enough to significantly hurt your attacker.
A student who is being attacked and knows he is outclassed can try to punch back and hope for the best. Or he can give in to the attacker's demands. Or he can run away.
Or he can run away, then find a way to "hit back" at his attacker in a different manner than hand-to-hand combat. A student, tired of being bullied at school every day, might decide to bring in a handgun. A terrorist organization with no chance of defeating the US military might decide to attack soft civilian US targets.
Sometimes it is necessary to punch back. However if you are one of the "good guys" who goes around punching people in the face in order to make this point, don't be surprised when they eventually change the rules and "punch back" in a way that really hurts you!
Disclaimer: Don't support the terrorists or their actions; agree that they must be hunted down. Just don't think that Bush's "Good vs. Evil" attitude is doing anything to reduce the chance of future terrorism.
I mean, what a better proof could you find that (while patents are inherently a good thing) the way they're being handled of late is, well, kinda bad..
Abstract:
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
These fuel cells will carry water or hydrocarbons. They will split the hydrogen out as it is needed
This got an "insightful" moderation???
It takes more energy to split hydrogen from water, than you get back by running the fuel cell on the hydrogen. This makes sense in some situations, for example a solar-power application where you can build up a supply of hydrogen when the sun's shining and then convert it back to electricity at night. It's like a storage battery, and as far as commercial aviation is concerned it'd be about as useful as a cargo hold full of lead-acid batteries.
As for splitting the hydrogen out from a hydrocarbon as needed, well, wasn't the whole point of the exercise to get rid of the hydrocarbons so that they wouldn't cause high-temperature fires in a crash?
Maybe there's a compromise, like using methane to power the jet engines (probably don't even need a fuel cell). Methane is a lot more volatile than traditional jet fuel, so it might disperse more quickly in a crash situation [and no jokes about the smell please; pure methane is odorless]. However this probably isn't economically viable.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, should we dangle a crystal over the official's hand too, and see whether it swings in a circle or a straight line? Maybe we ought to make sure the shape of his head isn't that of a probable criminal.
Many people are of the opinion that the polygraph isn't too far above some of these other methods. Personally, I'd expect it not to be very effective against politicians since most of them probably believe their own BS most of the time.
Nice idea, though.
Getting the size wrong by a factor of TWO is unlikely.
... unless you're selling tape drives. %#@%$^#@$ marketing weasels!
Maybe that's it - "10G capacity [assuming a 2:1 compression ratio for your MP3s; only has 5G "native" capacity but buy it anyway because 10 is a nice big number and only whiny nerds read these footnotes]".
an afternoon of experimenting, a halfway decent multimeter and a few trips to Radio Shack you can make a quality power supply for just about anything
This used to be true back when all power supplies were the linear "big brick of iron + 4 diodes" variety. However a proper switch-mode supply is not that easy to build (and Radio Shack is unlikely to sell the specialty transformers, high-frequency FETs, low-ESR capacitors, and inductor cores that you need; heck, they hardly even sell transistors these days).
You could do it with a few next-day deliveries from Digi-Key, an oscilloscope, an AC isolation transformer (to limit the damage when something fails on the "hot side" of the circuit), etc. However you might just end up paying the $$ for a nice Omron or similar industrial power supply. One with a UL/CSA rating too, so it doesn't start a fire that your insurance won't cover.
Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't build a power supply if you're interested in that sort of thing (and the ARRL handbook does have some good examples). Just make sure you're doing it because you want to do it, not just because you want to have a power supply.
Good point. I stand corrected.
I don't normally use the "NDEBUG" flag, and when I looked at the man page I guess I assumed that "assert(x)" would become "x" instead of "" when NDEBUG was on. However I just tested it, and it does indeed throw away the whole statement. Not the way I'd do it, but I guess the standards committee had their reasons (or were all in a hurry to take off for a long weekend...).
For instance, I know many "average" users who eject floppy disks and CD-ROMs from the drive while they are being read. Any Linux user who tries a stunt like that deserves a seg fault (or worse)
Well, an Amiga would give you a "You MUST replace volume < disklabel > in drive < device >!!!" if you ejected a disk while it was in use. It was a good reminder to the user that he had just done a Bad Thing, but the program could (usually) continue once it got the disk back. I don't think the application program even knew that this had happened; the read() call just blocked until the disk was put back.
If the OS isn't able to handle this sort of situation, the application program should get an EIO error on its read(). However this shouldn't translate into a segfault. Nothing should translate into a segfault - at worst an abort() if the program doesn't feel like recovering from the error.
Of course a "real OS" will just lock the CD-ROM or floppy drive [hardware permitting], thus preventing the user from ejecting a disk that's in use (unless the user has a paperclip, in which case he does deserve whatever he gets).
It's even easier than that - just use the built-in "assert()" macro. This is a good thing to wrap around any function call that "can't ever fail", just so that when it does fail, your program will terminate cleanly and tell you the location of the error.
(Insert standard Douglas Adams quote about things that can't ever go wrong)
The "right choice" eh? Tell me then, how come both the C64 and Amiga are dead?
The Amiga is dead primarily for marketing/mismanagement reasons, but also in part because it tied its OS very tightly to custom hardware. This gave it an early advantage, blowing almost everyone else out of the water in terms of graphics, sound, multitasking, etc. However it became a liability as time went on and the competing hardware improved - certain parts of the Amiga were still tightly tied to the old custom chipset. I do not believe that "inability to run C64 programs natively" was a significant factor in the ultimate demise of the Amiga.
As for why the C64 itself died, mainly just because it reached the end-point of its evolution, and the rest of the world moved on. It was an 8-bit machine, and that imposed certain fundamental limitations on it. Yes they could've clocked it up to 25 MHz, strapped on big-ass heatsinks, and added more and more bank-switched RAM, but it just wasn't worth it. Sometimes you have to walk away and start from a clean slate.
Nowadays, both the C64 and the Amiga can be emulated in software. I don't remember what capabilities the Amiga had for emulating the C64. Quite frankly, I didn't really care anymore after I had had the Amiga for a while.
Never mind the fact that even Linux is based on an initial x86 boot-process. (Though obviously it's not tied to it given it's multi-platform support).
One of the nicest things about using Linux on a non-x86 platform is that you often get to use a much more advanced bootloader. E.g. on the (now defunct) StrongARM-based Netwinder, you could do a diskless boot (TFTP+NFS), specify the name of the kernel image you wanted to run (dynamically, instead of having to put it in a conf and run 'lilo'), get full serial-console support, etc. Similarly for the Mac's "Open Firmware".
The only reason x86 Linux uses the "16 bit" cruft is because it has to.
As for the Windows market, they're moving to a "subscription" model anyway in order to get a more continuous revenue stream. Once consumers are in the habit of updating all their software every (x) months whether they need it or not, it becomes easier to switch the underlying architecture. You'd use a software emulator or 'virtual machine' model to support the "legacy" software. Sure it would slow down the old apps a lot, but that's what the manufacturers want anyway so they can sell you a new chip / application with 'go faster stripes'.
Interesting points about how all the registers are used... I've never actually been brave enough to get into x86 assembly. I have a Motorola background, so I'm used to things like a flat 4G address space, "data" registers and "address" registers, and memory-mapped IO. My brain just balked at the x86 world of "memory segments", "al/ah/ax/eax", etc.
Don't you think that we've hauled along the old 8086/XT baggage long enough? Do we really need a 64-bit 2GHz processor that can still run an MS-DOS 1.0 executable file, or that needs a multi-stage boot loader to crawl its way up the evolutionary ladder from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit "mode", accompanied by a BIOS that has 6 different ways to map a 400G hard-drive into a 1024x16x63 parameter space?
:-)
I feel that at some point the best thing to do is walk away from the old architecture and make a fresh start with a new one. Commodore did this when they went from the C-64 to the Amiga. Users grumbled for a while, but I think that in hindsight it turned out to be the right choice - once people began to exploit the capabilities of the new platform, compatibility with the old one became irrelevant. And there's always software emulation for those cases when you really do need to preserve the old stuff.
Note that I don't actually know how much "legacy" x86 code is in the Hammer, but even the article's little picture of the register structure makes be think the answer is "too much". Anyway, when did a lack of factual knowledge ever stop someone from ranting on Slashdot?
I have trouble understanding why Slashot users are such haters when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs.
Here's my theory - it's because the good Apple stuff is priced just out of our reach. We love cool tech, but we hate cool tech that we can't have.
Of course some of the Apple stuff has just been too "cute" to be taken seriously (like the original "toilet seat" iBooks). However I have spent quite a bit of time drooling over stuff like the G4 Powerbook, G4 Cube, and even the old NeXT (not strictly an Apple product, but close enough).
Note that I'm not an Apple-hater. I am very happy with my iBook2, and I agree with you that it's a real pleasure to see a company for whom "innovation" actually means something. I'll trade a few% of raw CPU speed for some good engineering design any day.
No, that's acutally correct. To speed up, you slow down (and conversely).
It has to do with kinetic and potential energy. For simplicity, assume circular orbits. The potential energy of an orbit is defined to be zero at an infinite orbital radius, and it becomes more negative as your radius shrinks.
Kinetic energy is positive, and is related to how fast you're going. For a circular orbit this turns out to be (IIRC) exactly -1/2 of the potential energy. So the total energy of an orbiting body is (KE + PE) = ((-1/2 * PE) + PE) = PE/2 (which is still a negative quantity).
Now when a body loses energy through aerobraking friction, its total energy decreases. This means that its potential energy decreases but its kinetic energy (therefore its speed) increases.
[Hope I got that right. It's been a while since I had to do this stuff]
Oh, yeah, excellent idea. The higher your karma, the fewer/smaller your ads are.
I wasn't thinking of a "state"-based system: if (Karma > 40) then no_adds; else if (Karma > 20) then some_adds; else spam_you_ragged;, although that could work too.
I was thinking that you would "spend" some of your Karma to be free of ads for a block of time (just like you'd get by paying a cash subscription fee). Karma becomes largely meaningless once you hit +50 (though it still irks me when I get a comment modded to +5 then down to +4 overrated, and end up with a net -1 karma loss, but that's another rant). If Karma could be spent each month to pay for an ad-free subscription, it would give people an incentive to keep creating valuable content.
Yes there are drawbacks. It might encourage "karma whoring", though that's more an issue with the moderation system and what the moderators choose to reward. Also, some jurisdictions would probably consider the Karma points to be "taxable income"...
I would say: cat /bin/laden | kill
/bin/laden
/bin/laden
/bin/laden executable by all" for you non-Unix folks).
Firstly, congratulations on winning this week's 'useless cat' award - in cases like this, you should redirect stdin on the second command instead of running an unnecessary 'cat'. Like this:
kill <
[And to bring this post somewhat on-topic, how about a Slashdot Enhancement so that a "Plain Old Text" comment will actually recognize a '<' character as a '<' instead of making me write it as '& lt'?]
Secondly, the best version of this I've seen is:
chmod a+x
(That's "make
I think that users should be able to "pay" for their subscription fees with Karma points instead of cash (or some combination thereof). E.g. each Karma point could be worth 1/10 of the monthly fee.
:-)
Most of the value of slashdot is in the user comments, and I think it is only fair to give a "free ride" to those who contribute the most highly rated content.
Also, people who were bored with sitting at the +50 cap would have a way to reduce their Karma other than resorting to a week-long trolling spree.
Personally, I don't think they went far enough. We still got way too many useless letters in there. I mean, what the hell is 'c' for? Or 'x' or 'q' for that matter?
%% (fortunes)
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Dual boot between Mac OS and YDL2 is a breeze (pre OS X, at least-- I've seen some list traffic that indicates care is required with OS X).
I have an iBook2 with YDL2.0.
Whenever I switch the Mac startup preference between OS9 and OSX, it overwrites the boot setting so that the machine will bypass the yaboot loader and go directly to Mac every time. To correct it I have to go into the Open Firmware screen and change the boot-device variable to point back at the yaboot partition. It's not a huge bother because I don't use the Mac side very often, and when I do I normally stay in OSX.
Another good service is, of course, spamcop.net.
There's a free tool to de-obfuscate the headers of Spam and send complaint letters to the appropriate abuse departments. They also have a paid filtering service that will hold any possible spam messages until you manually approve the sender (or report it as spam). Money well spent, IMHO.
Spam should be legal, as long as they include a valid return addy, and have a way to remove people (for real)
As for the valid return address, I would say this is necessary (but not sufficient) for a Spam to be "legal" in any sense (along with "ADV:" in the subject line, other standard headers to identify it as spam, and a notification of how they got my email address so that I can badger / LART the upstream company to stop selling my info).
However, the "remove" method doesn't really work because these addresses are often just a way to verify that your address is still "live". One way to test this is to send a removal request using a newly-created address, then wait to start receiving spam on that address.
The only way for "opt-out" to actually work is to have a higher-level, trusted agency maintain the opt-out list (similar to "do-not-call" lists that exist for telemarketing agencies). However, given the nature of the Internet, it's hard to say what agencies should have jurisdiction here.
Of course, the best way to deal with spammers involves a jar of honey and an anthill...
That won't be an issue if you're programming for a higher-level target (Linux, POSIX, KDE, etc) - develop the code on the iBook, then just re-compile it on an x86 box when you need to create a production release. I did this with my last project, and it worked quite well.
There's another advantage - when you build your code on multiple platforms, you are more likely to find some types of bug (e.g. those that make assumptions about byte ordering or structure padding).
I think the iBook is a great little platform. The Apple claims of "up to 5 hours" seem a bit optimistic, but it does have very good battery life.
Perhaps what's needed is a USB dongle, with an external switch that fries the flash RAM inside, rendering it unusable, and unreadable even to people trained in data recovery.
Well, there's the Dallas Semiconductor iButton. It includes tamper-resistant features that will zero its RAM under certain conditions (e.g. over-temperature), although it doesn't have an actual "erase" switch.
If you're in Canada, please take a look at http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01100e.html.
The Canadian governemnt has asked for public comments on proposed (DMCA-style) changes to our copyright law. Although the deadline for initial submissions was September 15, you have until October 22 to make comments on those submissions.
Don't let the Canadian governemnt rubber-stamp the content industry's wishlist! Get your comments in while you can.
So how long until one of the slashdot trolls starts posting a GPS drawing of that goatse guy?
9) Repeat steps 5 through 8 until they understand that sometimes it is necessary to punch back.
You set up a very artificial scenario. The military person is almost certainly much better at hand-to-hand combat than the student. Even if the student punches back, he probably won't be able to incapacitate the military person. So why would the student think that punching back would stop further attacks, rather than escalating the intensity of those further attacks???
The only reason that "punching back" stops the violence is that the attacker's only goal is to incite the student to punch back. With more likely attack goals (trying to get your lunch money, doesn't like the color of your skin, etc) punching back will only stop the violence if you are strong enough to significantly hurt your attacker.
A student who is being attacked and knows he is outclassed can try to punch back and hope for the best. Or he can give in to the attacker's demands. Or he can run away.
Or he can run away, then find a way to "hit back" at his attacker in a different manner than hand-to-hand combat. A student, tired of being bullied at school every day, might decide to bring in a handgun. A terrorist organization with no chance of defeating the US military might decide to attack soft civilian US targets.
Sometimes it is necessary to punch back. However if you are one of the "good guys" who goes around punching people in the face in order to make this point, don't be surprised when they eventually change the rules and "punch back" in a way that really hurts you!
Disclaimer: Don't support the terrorists or their actions; agree that they must be hunted down. Just don't think that Bush's "Good vs. Evil" attitude is doing anything to reduce the chance of future terrorism.
I mean, what a better proof could you find that (while patents are inherently a good thing) the way they're being handled of late is, well, kinda bad..
Does US5443036: Method of exercising a cat qualify? (IIRC, this won an IgNobel in a previous year)
Abstract:
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
These fuel cells will carry water or hydrocarbons. They will split the hydrogen out as it is needed
This got an "insightful" moderation???
It takes more energy to split hydrogen from water, than you get back by running the fuel cell on the hydrogen. This makes sense in some situations, for example a solar-power application where you can build up a supply of hydrogen when the sun's shining and then convert it back to electricity at night. It's like a storage battery, and as far as commercial aviation is concerned it'd be about as useful as a cargo hold full of lead-acid batteries.
As for splitting the hydrogen out from a hydrocarbon as needed, well, wasn't the whole point of the exercise to get rid of the hydrocarbons so that they wouldn't cause high-temperature fires in a crash?
Maybe there's a compromise, like using methane to power the jet engines (probably don't even need a fuel cell). Methane is a lot more volatile than traditional jet fuel, so it might disperse more quickly in a crash situation [and no jokes about the smell please; pure methane is odorless]. However this probably isn't economically viable.
Klipsch is all hype -- even more hype than the pathetic Bose speakers. (Bose: We Look Cool, So We Don't Have to Sound Good.)
The way I heard it (from a Klipsch guy, incidentally) was: "No Highs, no Lows, it must be Bose".