I saw the 3 photographs and really don't see what the big deal is.
I have to disagree. In the first of the original photos, the soldier is making a gesture that I would interpret as "sit your ass down" and the guy with the kid is looking around to see what's going on.
In the second frame, the guy with the kid is approaching the soldier; the soldier is watching him approach. Put the two together the way the photographer did and the overall message is "I have a sick kid"..."Sit your ass down."
Quite different. Maybe you don't agree, but I still agree with the other comments: any editting of "news" photographs is too much.
Hmmm... go to two stores and buy two different copies of the same CD. Rip the tracks from both with cdparanoia or similar. Look at the diff between the two.
Figure out where it is in the file (beginning/end/n bytes offset). Write a script to zero out those bytes in a WAV (or randomly perturb a little in the least significant bits if that's what it takes).
Shouldn't take more than an afternoon, I'd think. The whole thing can't be that hard--CDs are basically a list of samples. Without more advanced data storage, there isn't much to hide.
I suppose the watermark could be at a random location in each track. That would be harder, but in the worst case: take two WAVs of any song and average the two.
In the academic sense of "published" anyway. I mean, he clearly "published" it on his web site, but if this is the most academically questionable thing on the web, we're doing well.
I think there may be too much of a tendency by professors to reuse educational materials. This may lead to a degree of standardization and uniformity of the educational experience that could harm progress.
You've never sat in a room with a bunch of University faculty members and tried to get them to agree on curriculum, have you?
I have. It's ugly. Questions like "Should we say the word 'polymorhphism' in course X?" lead to endless religious wars and whoever brought it up eventually goes back to their office and hides.
That aside, a University lecturer is (should be?) more than a reader. Everyone brings their own flavour to a course. I've never been able to use anyone else's lecture notes for a course. It just doesn't feel right--it's not yours.
My answer: Only if you want to write a compiler, or an operating system or do CPU design. Or, if you want to actually understand any of those things. In a group of computer science majors, that usually shuts them up.
That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for.
I agree; I don't see the point. I just upgraded to a Althon 2100+ from a Celeron 500 and the difference is minimal.
Kernels compile in a flash, but other than that, no great improvements. Some lags is a few applications are gone, which is nice.
What I really want is a faster hard drive--the only real wait on my system is for large applications starting up as they come off the hard drive. Opening Openoffice takes about 10 seconds; closing it and opening again (from cache) takes maybe two.
I'm thinking about setting up my/usr partition as a two-disk RAID-0. The throughput should double (small test partition confirms). Sure the probability of failure doubles too, but my/usr is all backed up by my local Debian archive anyway.:-)
I recently did a fresh reinstall of my Debian system after about 4 years of heavy use and a lot of package installs/purges. In that time, I probably tried a dozens of window managers, games, office suites and other stuff.
I was finding that I had a lot of cruft in/etc. This was partially files that didn't need to be there, but also files that I had edited manually, so dpkg and friends wouldn't manage them any more. I decided on a fresh reinstall and to restore only files that I really knew I wanted manual control over. It's worked out quite well.
The thing that really differentiates Unix from Windows in this respect is that you can actually fix cruft problems in a meaningful way. Do a ps aux and see what's running and check the/etc/rc* files for stuff that shouldn't be there. That will take care of cruft-related performance problems.
Having an aesthetically pleasing/etc is another matter.:-)
I've read this kind of thing before here, and it bugs me every time.
Suppose you and I are standing next to each other on the street. You say "I don't like that car" and I say "I like that car." Are we hypocritical?
No. We are two different people with two opinions.
If a week ago a bunch of people supported MS plan X and today a bunch of people asserted that it's the work of the devil, there is no hypocracy as long as they are different people.
There are some 4e5 registered users around here. Some of them are probably hypocrits. Some of the editors might be hypocrits. The only way for "Slashdot" to be hypocritical is for all of us to agree to have a single opinion on all issues.
Unless some TOS agreement somewhere has changed, I haven't agreed to any such thing.
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but how does replacing the word "mocha" prevent cross-site scripting problems? Is mocha() a function in some language with semantics "format the hard drive"?
Even if there's some great effect, wouldn't it be easy to replace the word only if it appeared in a script? Or does IE extend it's baffling type guessing to parts of documents as well?
My firewall runs ntpd to sync its time with one of the public time servers in Canada. All of my Unix-ish machines run ntpd to synchronize with that; Windows machines run Tardis on startup to sync.
A trick to find nearby time servers (other than looking at a list): run ntptrace on a nearby, well-administered Unix machine. Find the last machine that's inside the organization--that will be the one they sync with the outside world. Run ntpq on that machine and type peers. You'll see a list of the NTP servers that it queries. Put some of those in your/etc/ntp.conf and you're good.
I recently started scanning pictures with the intent of creating an HTML-based gallery on a CD that could be passed around.
The best gallery creator I found was Curator. It takes directories of pictures and creates static HTML from arbitrarily-customizable templates.
You can create description files for each picture and have them incorporated into the pages. The templates are written in a combination of HTML and Python.
Creating the templates takes some doing, but after that, everything's dead simple.
...introductory classes where the goal is to teach you programming in a specific language.
Teaching a specific programming language is the goal of no introductory computing science course. If you took one and still think so, you missed the point.
In an average introductory CS course, you should learn things like ADTs, recursion, control structures and basic algorithms. Depending on the slant, also some introductory OO.
Learning things like "put a semicolon after each statement" or "'else if' is really two words" are just side points that let you do an assignment that exercises the real concepts. I know of some CS courses that give students a choice of the language for their assignments. I think this is a fine idea; it forces them to realize that the language doesn't matter (concept-wise).
This by no stretch the first time MS has caused life to imitate satire. Remember setting anyone straight on the Good Times "virus"? "No," you said, "emails aren't programs, so such a thing is impossible." Then, they wrote Outlook.
I'm working on it for my site. I've got all of the ugliness done (I had no idea how many acronyms I used), there's just a few small AAA level things I have to fix up now.
This is a good example of security through obscurity, particularly the MacOS example in the article.
Obscurity is no basis for a security model, but a little obscurity thrown in on top of some real security can't hurt.
For example, a tech I know runs a MySQL server that shouldn't be exposed to the outside world. It's behind a firewall and the port is blocked, fine. It's also run on a non-standard port. Why? Because if somebody cracks the main network, they still have some work to do to get to find the MySQL server. That's time to discover the intrusion and fix the leak.
Summary: Security through obscurity: bad. Security + obscurity: good.
I don't know if the article is already/.ed or if my browser's being funky, but I can's read it. I can tell you why I wouldn't use the.NET code in a course.
First, in what course exactly would an instructor want to say "Well, here's a whole bunch of code from a commercial (or any) project. Study it." I agree it's good to have an example around for some things, but if MS thinks the Universities are going to create a course like "The.NET Code", they're dreaming.
Second, if I did want a large code example, I'd want a good example. I'd want to be able to point to almost any part of the code and say "That's the right way to do it." I've never seen any MS code, but I'm going to idly speculate that you couldn't do that with it. Probably MS isn't shooting for the.NET code being used as a cautionary tale.
Alpha-Beta pruning is "deep"? Isn't "If you did this and the outcome is be horrible, don't do that; if it would be really good, do it" not a more-or-less complete summary of it? This is the thinking that leads to software patents.
And, as another post mentioned, it's a heuristic, not an algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was an Apple IIgs (actually, the GS was set in smallcaps). The //e might have been retroactively renamed IIe.
I have to disagree. In the first of the original photos, the soldier is making a gesture that I would interpret as "sit your ass down" and the guy with the kid is looking around to see what's going on.
In the second frame, the guy with the kid is approaching the soldier; the soldier is watching him approach. Put the two together the way the photographer did and the overall message is "I have a sick kid"..."Sit your ass down."
Quite different. Maybe you don't agree, but I still agree with the other comments: any editting of "news" photographs is too much.
It's not yet April 1 in my time zone. I call shenanagans!
"I have money!"
Rambus says they legally destroyed the documents, a Judge says they illegally destroyed the documents. Rambus is useless.
:-)
Figure out where it is in the file (beginning/end/n bytes offset). Write a script to zero out those bytes in a WAV (or randomly perturb a little in the least significant bits if that's what it takes).
Shouldn't take more than an afternoon, I'd think. The whole thing can't be that hard--CDs are basically a list of samples. Without more advanced data storage, there isn't much to hide.
I suppose the watermark could be at a random location in each track. That would be harder, but in the worst case: take two WAVs of any song and average the two.
Who said anything about it being published?
In the academic sense of "published" anyway. I mean, he clearly "published" it on his web site, but if this is the most academically questionable thing on the web, we're doing well.
You've never sat in a room with a bunch of University faculty members and tried to get them to agree on curriculum, have you?
I have. It's ugly. Questions like "Should we say the word 'polymorhphism' in course X?" lead to endless religious wars and whoever brought it up eventually goes back to their office and hides.
That aside, a University lecturer is (should be?) more than a reader. Everyone brings their own flavour to a course. I've never been able to use anyone else's lecture notes for a course. It just doesn't feel right--it's not yours.
My answer: Only if you want to write a compiler, or an operating system or do CPU design. Or, if you want to actually understand any of those things. In a group of computer science majors, that usually shuts them up.
Use the good book and put the one with the tests on reserve in your library. Does that do it?
I agree; I don't see the point. I just upgraded to a Althon 2100+ from a Celeron 500 and the difference is minimal. Kernels compile in a flash, but other than that, no great improvements. Some lags is a few applications are gone, which is nice.
What I really want is a faster hard drive--the only real wait on my system is for large applications starting up as they come off the hard drive. Opening Openoffice takes about 10 seconds; closing it and opening again (from cache) takes maybe two.
I'm thinking about setting up my /usr partition as a two-disk RAID-0. The throughput should double (small test partition confirms). Sure the probability of failure doubles too, but my /usr is all backed up by my local Debian archive anyway. :-)
I was finding that I had a lot of cruft in /etc. This was partially files that didn't need to be there, but also files that I had edited manually, so dpkg and friends wouldn't manage them any more. I decided on a fresh reinstall and to restore only files that I really knew I wanted manual control over. It's worked out quite well.
The thing that really differentiates Unix from Windows in this respect is that you can actually fix cruft problems in a meaningful way. Do a ps aux and see what's running and check the /etc/rc* files for stuff that shouldn't be there. That will take care of cruft-related performance problems.
Having an aesthetically pleasing /etc is another matter. :-)
I've read this kind of thing before here, and it bugs me every time.
Suppose you and I are standing next to each other on the street. You say "I don't like that car" and I say "I like that car." Are we hypocritical? No. We are two different people with two opinions.
If a week ago a bunch of people supported MS plan X and today a bunch of people asserted that it's the work of the devil, there is no hypocracy as long as they are different people.
There are some 4e5 registered users around here. Some of them are probably hypocrits. Some of the editors might be hypocrits. The only way for "Slashdot" to be hypocritical is for all of us to agree to have a single opinion on all issues.
Unless some TOS agreement somewhere has changed, I haven't agreed to any such thing.
Even if there's some great effect, wouldn't it be easy to replace the word only if it appeared in a script? Or does IE extend it's baffling type guessing to parts of documents as well?
That's that font that looks kinda like Helvetica, right? [Maybe off-topic, but a neat article anyway.]
My firewall runs ntpd to sync its time with one of the public time servers in Canada. All of my Unix-ish machines run ntpd to synchronize with that; Windows machines run Tardis on startup to sync.
A trick to find nearby time servers (other than looking at a list): run ntptrace on a nearby, well-administered Unix machine. Find the last machine that's inside the organization--that will be the one they sync with the outside world. Run ntpq on that machine and type peers. You'll see a list of the NTP servers that it queries. Put some of those in your /etc/ntp.conf and you're good.
I recently started scanning pictures with the intent of creating an HTML-based gallery on a CD that could be passed around.
The best gallery creator I found was Curator. It takes directories of pictures and creates static HTML from arbitrarily-customizable templates. You can create description files for each picture and have them incorporated into the pages. The templates are written in a combination of HTML and Python.
Creating the templates takes some doing, but after that, everything's dead simple.
Teaching a specific programming language is the goal of no introductory computing science course. If you took one and still think so, you missed the point.
In an average introductory CS course, you should learn things like ADTs, recursion, control structures and basic algorithms. Depending on the slant, also some introductory OO.
Learning things like "put a semicolon after each statement" or "'else if' is really two words" are just side points that let you do an assignment that exercises the real concepts. I know of some CS courses that give students a choice of the language for their assignments. I think this is a fine idea; it forces them to realize that the language doesn't matter (concept-wise).
This by no stretch the first time MS has caused life to imitate satire. Remember setting anyone straight on the Good Times "virus"? "No," you said, "emails aren't programs, so such a thing is impossible." Then, they wrote Outlook.
Anybody have any experience with it? I'm curious, but I haven't heard anything about it, except ads on local radio.
I'm working on it for my site. I've got all of the ugliness done (I had no idea how many acronyms I used), there's just a few small AAA level things I have to fix up now.
This is a good example of security through obscurity, particularly the MacOS example in the article. Obscurity is no basis for a security model, but a little obscurity thrown in on top of some real security can't hurt.
For example, a tech I know runs a MySQL server that shouldn't be exposed to the outside world. It's behind a firewall and the port is blocked, fine. It's also run on a non-standard port. Why? Because if somebody cracks the main network, they still have some work to do to get to find the MySQL server. That's time to discover the intrusion and fix the leak.
Summary: Security through obscurity: bad. Security + obscurity: good.
First, in what course exactly would an instructor want to say "Well, here's a whole bunch of code from a commercial (or any) project. Study it." I agree it's good to have an example around for some things, but if MS thinks the Universities are going to create a course like "The .NET Code", they're dreaming.
Second, if I did want a large code example, I'd want a good example. I'd want to be able to point to almost any part of the code and say "That's the right way to do it." I've never seen any MS code, but I'm going to idly speculate that you couldn't do that with it. Probably MS isn't shooting for the .NET code being used as a cautionary tale.
"is be horrible" isn't be what I meant.
And, as another post mentioned, it's a heuristic, not an algorithm.