This is also despite the lack of scientific evidence linking G forces to brain injury...
Wait a minute, are you telling me that all those people out there that continue to pay $40/day for park admission, $4/slice of pizza, $3/drink, and then are willing to spend 2-3 hours waiting in line for a 40 second ride... have not suffered some kind of brain damage?
I dunno. When I go out shopping for something, it's more about buying something with features I need at a certain time. Just because something with more features comes out a week later for $10 more doesn't make what I bought any less useful.
Along the same lines, the time to buy a new piece of equipment, is when it's price equals the worth of it's features used by you for the expected life of the product. It would be nice to have some map of hardware prices throughout the year with variations for product releases et all... but from a value standpoint, reduced prices on hardware will most often not coincide with upgrade time. If you upgrade before you really need to because it is cheap, then you aren't really saving money because you are not fully utilizing your previous purchase.
Sheesh, I was just responding to the original poster's comment: "I've never understood why specific parents care all that muchm - after all, if they're doing their job, as they see it, their kids will never see such games anyway." .
Fuck them. Fuck every last one of the smugly self-righteous twits who are pimping their virtues out to the whole world to guilt the rest of us into showing that we "really care" by joining their inane causes.
So basically what I'm hearing here, is that we should all take part in the self righteous cause of fucking smugly self-righteous twits who are pimping their virtues out to the whole world? You're not going to stop people from lobbying anti-violence in media with an attitude like that. You might even encourage opposition.
The reason I posted the response I did was, until you understand why a parent might go on an anti-violence crusade, it is difficult to figure out how to bring them to a more informed opinion on the issue. Nowadays, when two groups argue back and forth on social issues, they tend to throw supporting statistical factoids at each other like monkeys throwing poo. No one changes their mind, they just sit around looking for bigger piles of poo. However, if you understand an issue from another person's perspective, it enables you to see the points where their idea breaks down and where it holds together. That's all I'm saying.
because somebody wants to make an end-run around my First Amendment right to say, think, or worship whatever I want (provided it does not harm others), I'm supposed to feel complimented?
You're taking it all out of context. When the chap tried to convert me to christianity I took it as a compliment because he has a roughly similar moral code to myself and it was sort of his way of giving me a compliment... sort of like a nice guy saying you're a nice enough guy to join my club. I did not mean to imply that we should feel complimented by everyone's actions to protect us including the clan or a mob of angry concerned mothers. Indeed, my statement applied only to myself in that particular situation. I personally don't believe in any limitations on free speech with the possible exception of people having a right to not have to listen.
but most of them impose much less stringent math and science requirements than (say) the physics or chemistry curricula
As for math, my old school (Ohio State) has very similar requirements for Computer Science, Physics, and Chemistry. Everyone takes a four course calculus sequence. After that things diverge a little with different disciplines focussing on related Math skills. CS students take a formal proof/logic course and a couple advanced statistics courses. Physics students take a DiffEQ course and something called Vector Analysis for Engineers. Chem majors take a diff eq course similar to that required for the Physics students. But why does this even matter? I mean we all take math appropriate to our discipline, in general far more than most people out there. Why get in some kind of archaic bragging ritual over a few credit hours?
As far as having less stringent science requirements for a CS major than a Physics or Chem major, all I've got to say is, well duh. That's like criticizing Math majors for taking less science than a Physics student....
The attitude seemed to me, "Hell, I'll just grab the code out of _Numerical Methods_ or wherever."
Great, that's more or less exactly what they should do. Why spend time trying to deduce your own method for calculating something when there are proven, efficient algorithms available. Sure, there are times when one might want to research a different method for some advanced mathematical calculation but this almost never occurs in everyday programming.
But ask your average geek how Millikan determined the charge on the electron, or how the experiment worked which first determined (with some certainty) that it was nucleic acids and not proteins which transmitted genetic information, and watch him sweat and run to Google for the answer.
I don't know the answers to those questions off hand. hmmm, Millikan, something about an oil drop? What's wrong with looking them up on google? I don't see anything wrong with that. I guess part of my problem here is, for me, the answers to those questions are just factoids. Bits of trivia I don't need to know right now. To a physicist or chemist they could be very important because they give insight into experimental practices within those fields. As a CS, I'm more interested in algorithm research, studies on human/computer interaction, effects of cognitive dissonance on a programmer, etc. I guess what I'm trying to say is... I don't care about the details of those two experiments and don't see why I should, apples and oranges.
As a side, a lot of physicists, chemists, and computer scientists out there have probably never heard of Milgram's experiments which are arguably more important than either of the things you mentioned.
No kidding. I've never understood why specific parents care all that much - after all, if they're doing their job, as they see it, their kids will never see such games anyway.
I'm not a religious person, but I know a few. One in particular has put a concerted effort into trying to save me. Now, rather than sitting around getting in arguments with the chap, my reaction has been to take it as something of a compliment. He believes that the only way to save a person is to convert them to his faith. In his eyes, not attempting to do so would be a sin. In his own way, he's trying to protect me.
I'm not a parent and I do love games, counterstrike in particular. If you look at a stereotypical example of a "concerned parent," they believe violence in media is detrimental to their children, other people's children, and consequently society as a whole. If they are good (TM) people, they will try to convince the rest of the world of this perceived danger and force reform. By doing so, they are attempting to protect their children from media and other children, as well as protecting society as a whole. So the reason specific parents care all that much is that they are trying to protect us from a very real perceived threat.
Ok, I went to OSU (http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu), we had something like 18 libraries the biggest of which was 11 stories. There is no way that even 1% of the information in these libraries could be digitized with current tech. It just isn't feasible.
Now I'll be the first to admit, that if information is hard to access, it's usefulness is somewhat limitted. However, if it doesn't exist, it is useless.
The JRE is too big to require modem users to download so they can access a chat room. If you want to do things the swing way, maybe you could have two different interfaces to the same chat room. You could even abandon the awt code if you wanted, only adding features to the swing side. That would provide your users with a gradually increasing incentive to upgrade to the latest JRE without cutting them off.
The GRACE design team deserves kudos, but I still think that robots/AI should primarily be designed and programmed to do things that humans are BAD at...
The trick is, robots need to be able to do things that humans are good at in order to do many things we are bad at. For example, humans make lousy temps. You often have to explain the instructions more than once, we make mistakes performing repetitous tasks, we hate menial work, etc. But in order to be a good temp, you need lots of human skills in order to interact with people.
Think of it this way, typical humans are bad, really bad, at interfacing with computers. Grace's social interface helps fill the gap between our inability to learn/remember arcane controls and whatever she does. In essence she is learning the arcane controls for us and providing a more friendly interface.
... like searching through dangerous rubble, or performing fine manipulations in toxic or extreme-temperature environments, rather than doing things that humans are already quite GOOD at, like schmoozing.
I think a case could be made that humans are in general better than autonomous machines at searching and performing delicate manipulations (with tools). It's just the dangerous environments in your example that rule us out. If we were to have the robots schmooze in a puddle of molten lava, we'd have the same quandry.
I've been using MySQL for a while now, mostly for small personal projects and what not. Now I'm starting to mess with PostgreSQL mainly because a lot of 'people' were talking about it and it has some stuff I've been missing like sub-selects.
Everyone knows that MySQL is not a good choice for heavy lifting, it's much better for lightweight applications where you have a simple database with lots of SELECTs and not much updating.
If all you have is a simple database without lots of selects and not much updating, then why does it matter all that much what dbms you use? Why not use the system with more features?
Real Player has a "feature" which allows it to protect the extensions associated to it against other programs like Media Player and Winamp which I believe have a similar "features". With Real Player I think it is turned on by default. Basically, it is not enough to register a file type with Winamp, you must also unregister it with RealPlayer through their settings wizard... or find someway to kill their scheduler. Here is an excerpt from a RP help file...
"Ask": During installation RealOne Player will ask you for permission to become the default media player for media types that may be assigned to other programs on your computer. Using a feature called Scheduler, RealOne Player will periodically check to ensure that your media playback preferences have not been overridden by another program, even when RealOne Player is not in use. Any media type that you have assigned to RealOne Player will be reclaimed automatically when another program attempts to override your choices.
For example, if another program decided for you that it should be your default media player for a given media type, RealOne Player would silently and automatically correct the change to protect your original choice. If you wish to change the media types that you have associated with the RealOne Player you can follow these steps: On the Tools menu, select 'Preferences', 'Media Types', then select the media types you want RealOne Player to be associated with. Select the "OK" button to save your changes.
You can configure the Scheduler to operate only when RealOne Player is in use by following these steps: On the Tools menu, select 'Preferences', 'Connection', 'Internet Settings', then select "Only perform automatic services while RealOne Player is in use". Select the "Yes" button when the confirmation dialog appears.
Please Note: We will always reassociate media types with RealOne Player that are unique to RealNetworks' products and cannot be played by other applications (such as RealAudio and RealVideo).
One of the major problems I've encountered with windows is the whole dll hell thing. Even if you have an adequate uninstaller, sometimes windows will just not let things go. For instance, the command to unregister a dll is regsvr32/u my.dll . Windows will always tell you the unregister succeeded. However, if something is using the dll at the time (like a webserver), then it hasn't really been unregistered.
Doing development on 2K, we sometimes had situations where we would unregister a dll and type library and delete them... only to find out Windows had secretly moved them to the winnt\system32 directory and reregistered them there. It was not uncommon for me to open up OLE View and see a couple instances of the same object pointing to a not in use file I'd already unregistered about a dozen times. You'd periodically reach a point where the only way to get things to work would be to search through the registry manually removing all references to your dlls.
Re:programming zone?
on
Gaming Zone?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Does anyone here ever *think* they achieve this Flow State while coding?
No man, I take a potty break every couple hours to make sure this doesn't happen.
I walk in my house and leave the keys in the door for a second... and you're pulling the keys out of my door
From what I understand, the network in this case was completely insecure. There was no lock, there was no key. Meaning a 5 yr old with a laptop could gain access as easily as an IT professional.
you want to report an insecurity, do so with the people that create the operating system or program
The industry standard (many companies) behind the insecure wireless network in question does in fact supply a way of making a wireless network more secure. The county office had not bothered to activate these security features. Reporting them to the manufacturers would be meaningless. As much as we might like to think security is always the manufacturers responsibility, that simply isn't true.
What we need to allow, it the open selling of US citizenship rights by US citizens to anybody who wants it.
So what happens to the poor people who sold their citizenship. Must they leave the country or do they just slowly accumulate as a mass of poor residents who are no longer protected as citizens by US law.
Fortunately MIT does this a little differently and slightly more hacker proof. They don't rely on any publicly (to any admissions office) available information but assign you with a unique 9-digit id number from the beginning of the application process and all of your online information is tied to this id.
This is what all schools should be doing. If an institution receives public funding, they are required to abide by FERPA, Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. This Act prohibits disclosure of personally identifiable information without written consent. So anytime your local university distributes a class roster with SSN's, any time they print an SSN on your University ID, or any time they use your SSN as an identifier for you in a campus wide database system, that is a violation of FERPA. For some reason, most universities ignore this. http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs10-ssn.htm
Every time I go into an interviewer knowing the name, company, or email address of the interviewer, I will always look them up via google and deja, just to see what turns up. Once I found that the president of the startup company I was interviewing for had built a couple websites on commission and then spammed the hell out of several newsgroups in order to boost hits.
If you put stuff out there on the net, then you're stuck with it out there.
None of this might be happening if traditional 30-second commercials got more respect. Many consumers treat them as an excuse to change channels.
Ok now, I'm going to admit something scary. I like commercials, some of them anyway. Some of them are actually quite funny like the Squirrel-Geiko, Dog driving-carfax, dancing Gerbil-Block Buster. Well at least they were somewhat amusing before they were played to death.
There are three classes of commercial that will make me change the channel: Collect calling, Psychic hotline, and any best of cds. There have been several times I've been happily watching some show only to be driven away by yet another frightening visage of carrot top, terry bradshaw or even sweet Alyssa Milano... and when I say driven away, I'm not talking about flipping during the commercials but simply turning off the tv.
So, I'd say it's not the consumer's "fault" for becoming desensitized to normal commercials. It is the advertisers fault for making ads which are so awful they actually drive viewers away. If you think about it, some of these ads are so awful they are actually lowering the ratings of the stations running them.
I think that search engines really get users on credibility.
Search engines get informed users this way. In many cases people just use whatever they have at hand not realizing there may be a qualitative difference between whatever aol uses and google.
It's just plain wrong that, for instance, millions of office workers in poorer countries are laboriously doing by hand tasks that can, with simple, existing tech, be automated.
Your comment reminded me of a ManPower temp assignment I got a while back. It was a 2-3 day temp assignment that involved data entry. When I arrived at the business and received my instructions, it turned out that they wanted me to take all the data in an "ACT" database and manually enter it into an Access database. At any rate, this made me start twitching uncontrollably. I started off doing the assignment the way I had been instructed (that's just what you do when you are temping). As soon as my supervisor left for lunch, I did an export/import and was done by the time she got back. The moral of the story is, people waste enormous amounts of time because they don't understand the software tools they have.
Here's another example. My sister was temping for an online information publishing company. They had been outsourcing their Resume/Job application stuff to a third party who was going out of business. They needed to move something like 10-20 thousand applications/resumes from the third party to a new provider of the same service. After talking with both the old and new vendor, HR came up with this wonderful idea. The original vendor would email the publishing company all of the applications/resumes. The publishing company would then print them out and ship them to the new Resume/Application company. The new company would then manually scan all the resumes into their system using scanners/text recognition. The whole process took a little over a month. I kept telling my sister that it could probably all be done in a couple days with proper coordination and maybe a little perl script, but then of course, she'd be out of a job.
Most Road Runner outlets have a no server clause. They've had one in the aup for at least 3 years. When I first signed up with them, I hadn't done my research. I asked the sales rep if I could host web/ftp servers and she said she didn't see why not. I asked the tech who installed the same question and he confirmed that it was ok to host servers. Later a friedn told me it was against the aup and sure enough it was. At one point I switched over to DSL and then back to Road Runner. Again I asked the Road Runner sales/techs the same question and they always said it was ok. The following is an excerpt from a nebraska branch of Road Runner. It looks like they may have different terms depending on what market you are in:
Road Runner AUP6. Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.
When a business tells you one thing and then does something completely different after you become a subscriber, are there ever any consumer protections that kick in?
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly. Actually, it couldn't be easier to change resolutions on the fly. Hold ctrl and alt, then hit - or + on the numberic key pad. This cycles you through all your selected resolutions, on the fly.
As others pointed out, this appears to resize the viewable area of the desktop. And ctrl alt +/- is so much more obscure than being able to do it from a desktop configuration program. I'm not saying ctrl alt +/- should be replaced, I'm saying it should be configurable via gui without knowing the correct key sequence. The gui should tell you that you can also change resolutions using ctrl alt +/-
Just make sure you selected all the ones you want when you setup x (Red Hat users use Xconfigurator to select resolutions).
Heh, I just ran Xconfigurator and it hung while testing the resolution. When I originally went through setup, it detected my geForce2 but not my Samsung 955df. Yet when I ran Xconfigurator just now it detected my Samsung 955df but not my geForce2. That's mesed up.
Bugs aside, my problem with a program like XConfigurator is that it takes you through the entire configuration process sequentially each time you go through. If I want to add resolutions or see which resolutions I have selected as available I shouldn't have to go through Monitor/Video card selection to get there.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure. It can't get much easier that printconf (for Red Hat users).
Never used printconf, but theoretically, you ought to be able to just attach a printer and then print a document with no manual configuration at all... except maybe hitting ok once to install the printer software w/defaults with an option for doing things in advanced mode.
When will people realize that a computer it a techinical thing? You have to be willing to do a little homework, even with a mac (if you've never used one).
Eek! Computers are necessarily complex. The tools we use on them are often complex, but this doesn't mean they have to be complicated. Somethign can be complex and powerful but still be easy to use. Don't think of a computer as a technical thing you have to sit over dusty tomes to understand. Think of it as a black box tool that you use to accomplish particular tasks.
6. Die stray processes, die! Ever tried ctrl-alt-escape in KDE?
I have no idea what this is supposed to do but it does nothing for me in KDE, I think I'm on 3.0 in RH7.3. At least it doesn't do anything apparent. Obscure key sequences only work for general use when their obscurity is common knowledge.
7. Easy way of sharing files. You like in windows, where I find places like Doctors offices "sharing" all their patient records on the internet? Check out programs like share sniffer if you want to find them too.
Preventing normal people from using a feature by making it difficult to use is NEVER the answer. If you don't want a user to be able to do something, you restrict access to that feature, you don't make them do a little rain dance/consult the local shaman in order to use it.
8. Sound support. Ok, if you want professional audio production cards, you got me, but for most other sound cards there just isn't a problem.
Alright, I started off on RH-6.1, it could not autodetect my sblive value. I couldn't get it to work. Later I switched to debian (potato). I tried alsa, oss and every other alternative I could find and I could not get sound to work. In fact alsaconf would frequently core dump right off the bat whenever I tried to run it. This was with my sblive value and later a linux approved ensoniq. Now I've got another machine which I've installed the latest RH7.3 and it automagically detected and configured my 2 year old sblive, and although the rear speakers aren't getting anything yet, I think I know how to fix it. So to make a long story short, ease of configuring/setting up sound is only just getting there for me and I'm a CS graduate whose worked in Nix Ops and as a WinDeveloper.
Look what happened to the internet when it got popular...
Yeah that was awful. I got cheap broadband access, the ability to host my own content, access my machines from anywhere in the world, and my company got more business in the form of adding a web application layer to our application suite. As linux becomes more popular I'm betting the good will outweigh the bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Laptop: Hello, is anyone out there? Can I have an ip address please? Anyone?
Wireless Access Point: Of course, here you go. The company I represent has configured me to route packets for you. Have a nice day.
Nokia: Unauthorized Access!!! Thief!!!
Wireless Access Point: Uh, oh. Am I fired?
This is also despite the lack of scientific evidence linking G forces to brain injury...
Wait a minute, are you telling me that all those people out there that continue to pay $40/day for park admission, $4/slice of pizza, $3/drink, and then are willing to spend 2-3 hours waiting in line for a 40 second ride... have not suffered some kind of brain damage?
I dunno. When I go out shopping for something, it's more about buying something with features I need at a certain time. Just because something with more features comes out a week later for $10 more doesn't make what I bought any less useful.
Along the same lines, the time to buy a new piece of equipment, is when it's price equals the worth of it's features used by you for the expected life of the product. It would be nice to have some map of hardware prices throughout the year with variations for product releases et all... but from a value standpoint, reduced prices on hardware will most often not coincide with upgrade time. If you upgrade before you really need to because it is cheap, then you aren't really saving money because you are not fully utilizing your previous purchase.
Sheesh, I was just responding to the original poster's comment: "I've never understood why specific parents care all that muchm - after all, if they're doing their job, as they see it, their kids will never see such games anyway."
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Fuck them. Fuck every last one of the smugly self-righteous twits who are pimping their virtues out to the whole world to guilt the rest of us into showing that we "really care" by joining their inane causes.
So basically what I'm hearing here, is that we should all take part in the self righteous cause of fucking smugly self-righteous twits who are pimping their virtues out to the whole world? You're not going to stop people from lobbying anti-violence in media with an attitude like that. You might even encourage opposition.
The reason I posted the response I did was, until you understand why a parent might go on an anti-violence crusade, it is difficult to figure out how to bring them to a more informed opinion on the issue. Nowadays, when two groups argue back and forth on social issues, they tend to throw supporting statistical factoids at each other like monkeys throwing poo. No one changes their mind, they just sit around looking for bigger piles of poo. However, if you understand an issue from another person's perspective, it enables you to see the points where their idea breaks down and where it holds together. That's all I'm saying.
because somebody wants to make an end-run around my First Amendment right to say, think, or worship whatever I want (provided it does not harm others), I'm supposed to feel complimented?
You're taking it all out of context. When the chap tried to convert me to christianity I took it as a compliment because he has a roughly similar moral code to myself and it was sort of his way of giving me a compliment... sort of like a nice guy saying you're a nice enough guy to join my club. I did not mean to imply that we should feel complimented by everyone's actions to protect us including the clan or a mob of angry concerned mothers. Indeed, my statement applied only to myself in that particular situation. I personally don't believe in any limitations on free speech with the possible exception of people having a right to not have to listen.
but most of them impose much less stringent math and science requirements than (say) the physics or chemistry curricula
As for math, my old school (Ohio State) has very similar requirements for Computer Science, Physics, and Chemistry. Everyone takes a four course calculus sequence. After that things diverge a little with different disciplines focussing on related Math skills. CS students take a formal proof/logic course and a couple advanced statistics courses. Physics students take a DiffEQ course and something called Vector Analysis for Engineers. Chem majors take a diff eq course similar to that required for the Physics students. But why does this even matter? I mean we all take math appropriate to our discipline, in general far more than most people out there. Why get in some kind of archaic bragging ritual over a few credit hours?
As far as having less stringent science requirements for a CS major than a Physics or Chem major, all I've got to say is, well duh. That's like criticizing Math majors for taking less science than a Physics student....
The attitude seemed to me, "Hell, I'll just grab the code out of _Numerical Methods_ or wherever."
Great, that's more or less exactly what they should do. Why spend time trying to deduce your own method for calculating something when there are proven, efficient algorithms available. Sure, there are times when one might want to research a different method for some advanced mathematical calculation but this almost never occurs in everyday programming.
But ask your average geek how Millikan determined the charge on the electron, or how the experiment worked which first determined (with some certainty) that it was nucleic acids and not proteins which transmitted genetic information, and watch him sweat and run to Google for the answer.
I don't know the answers to those questions off hand. hmmm, Millikan, something about an oil drop? What's wrong with looking them up on google? I don't see anything wrong with that. I guess part of my problem here is, for me, the answers to those questions are just factoids. Bits of trivia I don't need to know right now. To a physicist or chemist they could be very important because they give insight into experimental practices within those fields. As a CS, I'm more interested in algorithm research, studies on human/computer interaction, effects of cognitive dissonance on a programmer, etc. I guess what I'm trying to say is... I don't care about the details of those two experiments and don't see why I should, apples and oranges.
As a side, a lot of physicists, chemists, and computer scientists out there have probably never heard of Milgram's experiments which are arguably more important than either of the things you mentioned.
No kidding. I've never understood why specific parents care all that much - after all, if they're doing their job, as they see it, their kids will never see such games anyway.
I'm not a religious person, but I know a few. One in particular has put a concerted effort into trying to save me. Now, rather than sitting around getting in arguments with the chap, my reaction has been to take it as something of a compliment. He believes that the only way to save a person is to convert them to his faith. In his eyes, not attempting to do so would be a sin. In his own way, he's trying to protect me.
I'm not a parent and I do love games, counterstrike in particular. If you look at a stereotypical example of a "concerned parent," they believe violence in media is detrimental to their children, other people's children, and consequently society as a whole. If they are good (TM) people, they will try to convince the rest of the world of this perceived danger and force reform. By doing so, they are attempting to protect their children from media and other children, as well as protecting society as a whole. So the reason specific parents care all that much is that they are trying to protect us from a very real perceived threat.
Ok, I went to OSU (http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu), we had something like 18 libraries the biggest of which was 11 stories. There is no way that even 1% of the information in these libraries could be digitized with current tech. It just isn't feasible.
Now I'll be the first to admit, that if information is hard to access, it's usefulness is somewhat limitted. However, if it doesn't exist, it is useless.
The JRE is too big to require modem users to download so they can access a chat room. If you want to do things the swing way, maybe you could have two different interfaces to the same chat room. You could even abandon the awt code if you wanted, only adding features to the swing side. That would provide your users with a gradually increasing incentive to upgrade to the latest JRE without cutting them off.
The GRACE design team deserves kudos, but I still think that robots/AI should primarily be designed and programmed to do things that humans are BAD at ...
... like searching through dangerous rubble, or performing fine manipulations in toxic or extreme-temperature environments, rather than doing things that humans are already quite GOOD at, like schmoozing.
The trick is, robots need to be able to do things that humans are good at in order to do many things we are bad at. For example, humans make lousy temps. You often have to explain the instructions more than once, we make mistakes performing repetitous tasks, we hate menial work, etc. But in order to be a good temp, you need lots of human skills in order to interact with people.
Think of it this way, typical humans are bad, really bad, at interfacing with computers. Grace's social interface helps fill the gap between our inability to learn/remember arcane controls and whatever she does. In essence she is learning the arcane controls for us and providing a more friendly interface.
I think a case could be made that humans are in general better than autonomous machines at searching and performing delicate manipulations (with tools). It's just the dangerous environments in your example that rule us out. If we were to have the robots schmooze in a puddle of molten lava, we'd have the same quandry.
I've been using MySQL for a while now, mostly for small personal projects and what not. Now I'm starting to mess with PostgreSQL mainly because a lot of 'people' were talking about it and it has some stuff I've been missing like sub-selects.
Everyone knows that MySQL is not a good choice for heavy lifting, it's much better for lightweight applications where you have a simple database with lots of SELECTs and not much updating.
If all you have is a simple database without lots of selects and not much updating, then why does it matter all that much what dbms you use? Why not use the system with more features?
Real Player has a "feature" which allows it to protect the extensions associated to it against other programs like Media Player and Winamp which I believe have a similar "features". With Real Player I think it is turned on by default. Basically, it is not enough to register a file type with Winamp, you must also unregister it with RealPlayer through their settings wizard... or find someway to kill their scheduler. Here is an excerpt from a RP help file...
"Ask": During installation RealOne Player will ask you for permission to become the default media player for media types that may be assigned to other programs on your computer. Using a feature called Scheduler, RealOne Player will periodically check to ensure that your media playback preferences have not been overridden by another program, even when RealOne Player is not in use. Any media type that you have assigned to RealOne Player will be reclaimed automatically when another program attempts to override your choices.
For example, if another program decided for you that it should be your default media player for a given media type, RealOne Player would silently and automatically correct the change to protect your original choice. If you wish to change the media types that you have associated with the RealOne Player you can follow these steps: On the Tools menu, select 'Preferences', 'Media Types', then select the media types you want RealOne Player to be associated with. Select the "OK" button to save your changes.
You can configure the Scheduler to operate only when RealOne Player is in use by following these steps: On the Tools menu, select 'Preferences', 'Connection', 'Internet Settings', then select "Only perform automatic services while RealOne Player is in use". Select the "Yes" button when the confirmation dialog appears.
Please Note: We will always reassociate media types with RealOne Player that are unique to RealNetworks' products and cannot be played by other applications (such as RealAudio and RealVideo).
One of the major problems I've encountered with windows is the whole dll hell thing. Even if you have an adequate uninstaller, sometimes windows will just not let things go. For instance, the command to unregister a dll is regsvr32 /u my.dll . Windows will always tell you the unregister succeeded. However, if something is using the dll at the time (like a webserver), then it hasn't really been unregistered.
... only to find out Windows had secretly moved them to the winnt\system32 directory and reregistered them there. It was not uncommon for me to open up OLE View and see a couple instances of the same object pointing to a not in use file I'd already unregistered about a dozen times. You'd periodically reach a point where the only way to get things to work would be to search through the registry manually removing all references to your dlls.
Doing development on 2K, we sometimes had situations where we would unregister a dll and type library and delete them
Does anyone here ever *think* they achieve this Flow State while coding?
No man, I take a potty break every couple hours to make sure this doesn't happen.
I walk in my house and leave the keys in the door for a second ... and you're pulling the keys out of my door
From what I understand, the network in this case was completely insecure. There was no lock, there was no key. Meaning a 5 yr old with a laptop could gain access as easily as an IT professional.
you want to report an insecurity, do so with the people that create the operating system or program
The industry standard (many companies) behind the insecure wireless network in question does in fact supply a way of making a wireless network more secure. The county office had not bothered to activate these security features. Reporting them to the manufacturers would be meaningless. As much as we might like to think security is always the manufacturers responsibility, that simply isn't true.
Psychology of Computer Programming
Gerald M Weinberg
What we need to allow, it the open selling of US citizenship rights by US citizens to anybody who wants it.
So what happens to the poor people who sold their citizenship. Must they leave the country or do they just slowly accumulate as a mass of poor residents who are no longer protected as citizens by US law.
Fortunately MIT does this a little differently and slightly more hacker proof. They don't rely on any publicly (to any admissions office) available information but assign you with a unique 9-digit id number from the beginning of the application process and all of your online information is tied to this id.
This is what all schools should be doing. If an institution receives public funding, they are required to abide by FERPA, Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. This Act prohibits disclosure of personally identifiable information without written consent. So anytime your local university distributes a class roster with SSN's, any time they print an SSN on your University ID, or any time they use your SSN as an identifier for you in a campus wide database system, that is a violation of FERPA. For some reason, most universities ignore this. http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs10-ssn.htm
Every time I go into an interviewer knowing the name, company, or email address of the interviewer, I will always look them up via google and deja, just to see what turns up. Once I found that the president of the startup company I was interviewing for had built a couple websites on commission and then spammed the hell out of several newsgroups in order to boost hits.
If you put stuff out there on the net, then you're stuck with it out there.
None of this might be happening if traditional 30-second commercials got more respect. Many consumers treat them as an excuse to change channels.
Ok now, I'm going to admit something scary. I like commercials, some of them anyway. Some of them are actually quite funny like the Squirrel-Geiko, Dog driving-carfax, dancing Gerbil-Block Buster. Well at least they were somewhat amusing before they were played to death.
There are three classes of commercial that will make me change the channel: Collect calling, Psychic hotline, and any best of cds. There have been several times I've been happily watching some show only to be driven away by yet another frightening visage of carrot top, terry bradshaw or even sweet Alyssa Milano... and when I say driven away, I'm not talking about flipping during the commercials but simply turning off the tv.
So, I'd say it's not the consumer's "fault" for becoming desensitized to normal commercials. It is the advertisers fault for making ads which are so awful they actually drive viewers away. If you think about it, some of these ads are so awful they are actually lowering the ratings of the stations running them.
I think that search engines really get users on credibility.
Search engines get informed users this way. In many cases people just use whatever they have at hand not realizing there may be a qualitative difference between whatever aol uses and google.
It's just plain wrong that, for instance, millions of office workers in poorer countries are laboriously doing by hand tasks that can, with simple, existing tech, be automated.
Your comment reminded me of a ManPower temp assignment I got a while back. It was a 2-3 day temp assignment that involved data entry. When I arrived at the business and received my instructions, it turned out that they wanted me to take all the data in an "ACT" database and manually enter it into an Access database. At any rate, this made me start twitching uncontrollably. I started off doing the assignment the way I had been instructed (that's just what you do when you are temping). As soon as my supervisor left for lunch, I did an export/import and was done by the time she got back. The moral of the story is, people waste enormous amounts of time because they don't understand the software tools they have.
Here's another example. My sister was temping for an online information publishing company. They had been outsourcing their Resume/Job application stuff to a third party who was going out of business. They needed to move something like 10-20 thousand applications/resumes from the third party to a new provider of the same service. After talking with both the old and new vendor, HR came up with this wonderful idea. The original vendor would email the publishing company all of the applications/resumes. The publishing company would then print them out and ship them to the new Resume/Application company. The new company would then manually scan all the resumes into their system using scanners/text recognition. The whole process took a little over a month. I kept telling my sister that it could probably all be done in a couple days with proper coordination and maybe a little perl script, but then of course, she'd be out of a job.
Most Road Runner outlets have a no server clause. They've had one in the aup for at least 3 years. When I first signed up with them, I hadn't done my research. I asked the sales rep if I could host web/ftp servers and she said she didn't see why not. I asked the tech who installed the same question and he confirmed that it was ok to host servers. Later a friedn told me it was against the aup and sure enough it was. At one point I switched over to DSL and then back to Road Runner. Again I asked the Road Runner sales/techs the same question and they always said it was ok. The following is an excerpt from a nebraska branch of Road Runner. It looks like they may have different terms depending on what market you are in:
Road Runner AUP6. Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.
When a business tells you one thing and then does something completely different after you become a subscriber, are there ever any consumer protections that kick in?
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
Actually, it couldn't be easier to change resolutions on the fly. Hold ctrl and alt, then hit - or + on the numberic key pad. This cycles you through all your selected resolutions, on the fly.
As others pointed out, this appears to resize the viewable area of the desktop. And ctrl alt +/- is so much more obscure than being able to do it from a desktop configuration program. I'm not saying ctrl alt +/- should be replaced, I'm saying it should be configurable via gui without knowing the correct key sequence. The gui should tell you that you can also change resolutions using ctrl alt +/-
Just make sure you selected all the ones you want when you setup x (Red Hat users use Xconfigurator to select resolutions).
Heh, I just ran Xconfigurator and it hung while testing the resolution. When I originally went through setup, it detected my geForce2 but not my Samsung 955df. Yet when I ran Xconfigurator just now it detected my Samsung 955df but not my geForce2. That's mesed up.
Bugs aside, my problem with a program like XConfigurator is that it takes you through the entire configuration process sequentially each time you go through. If I want to add resolutions or see which resolutions I have selected as available I shouldn't have to go through Monitor/Video card selection to get there.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
It can't get much easier that printconf (for Red Hat users).
Never used printconf, but theoretically, you ought to be able to just attach a printer and then print a document with no manual configuration at all... except maybe hitting ok once to install the printer software w/defaults with an option for doing things in advanced mode.
When will people realize that a computer it a techinical thing? You have to be willing to do a little homework, even with a mac (if you've never used one).
Eek! Computers are necessarily complex. The tools we use on them are often complex, but this doesn't mean they have to be complicated. Somethign can be complex and powerful but still be easy to use. Don't think of a computer as a technical thing you have to sit over dusty tomes to understand. Think of it as a black box tool that you use to accomplish particular tasks.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Ever tried ctrl-alt-escape in KDE?
I have no idea what this is supposed to do but it does nothing for me in KDE, I think I'm on 3.0 in RH7.3. At least it doesn't do anything apparent. Obscure key sequences only work for general use when their obscurity is common knowledge.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
You like in windows, where I find places like Doctors offices "sharing" all their patient records on the internet? Check out programs like share sniffer if you want to find them too.
Preventing normal people from using a feature by making it difficult to use is NEVER the answer. If you don't want a user to be able to do something, you restrict access to that feature, you don't make them do a little rain dance/consult the local shaman in order to use it.
8. Sound support.
Ok, if you want professional audio production cards, you got me, but for most other sound cards there just isn't a problem.
Alright, I started off on RH-6.1, it could not autodetect my sblive value. I couldn't get it to work. Later I switched to debian (potato). I tried alsa, oss and every other alternative I could find and I could not get sound to work. In fact alsaconf would frequently core dump right off the bat whenever I tried to run it. This was with my sblive value and later a linux approved ensoniq. Now I've got another machine which I've installed the latest RH7.3 and it automagically detected and configured my 2 year old sblive, and although the rear speakers aren't getting anything yet, I think I know how to fix it. So to make a long story short, ease of configuring/setting up sound is only just getting there for me and I'm a CS graduate whose worked in Nix Ops and as a WinDeveloper.
Look what happened to the internet when it got popular...
Yeah that was awful. I got cheap broadband access, the ability to host my own content, access my machines from anywhere in the world, and my company got more business in the form of adding a web application layer to our application suite. As linux becomes more popular I'm betting the good will outweigh the bad.