"I think it really depends on the individual.. I have seen students (mostly women hah) that are super organized using a simple planner and pencil, and others using a pda etc."
I think a paper planner and an ink pen is the best way to go, even better than a PDA.
On the planner you can scribble little maps, chemical structures, notes, etc, without resolution or colour limitations of a PDA screen. And it never runs out of power. You don't have to worry about crushing it or bending it. You can toss it around and not have to worry about scratching it. If you shop around, you can get a good one with one page per day for 10 dollars or less. There is no decent PDA for less than 10 dollars.
And about taking notes: Laptops are not such a good idea as they first seem to be. They don't fit very well on those little tablets in lecture halls. You always have to worry about someone else knocking it over and when the prof pulls out a diagram to show you, it's hard to transpose that onto a laptop. (The exception is profs that are cool enough to give you downloadable lecture templates beforehand that you just fill in.) (Although I did see one guy with a digicam for that purpose.)
Some people try to solve this problem by bringing PDAs to lectures but then they either get snarled by slow stylus data entry, or find out that the little writing tables on the lecture hall chairs is not wide enough to support their plam keyboard device. And they will be again out of luck of there is a diagram.
Now if you're in a discipline that doesn't require many diagrams, a tablet comptuer might work. But I am in engineering and there are always tonnes of little diagrams showing the setup for some type of problems. You've gotta have paper.
What laptops and PDAs are good for: Laboratory Experiments. It is a royal pain to be in a group of 4 people doing a lab experiment and one person scribbles all the results down on a piece of paper. Just try getting them to type out the results and send them on e-mail. They won't do it most of the time. So then you have to go on a wild goose chase to find the person to get the piece of paper and then photocopy it, but then you can't read their writing or it was too light to photocopy. If you type your results into a PDA you avoid any hadwriting problems and it can be distributed instantaneously. And digicams are an absolute luxury when they want you to show a diagram of an image on an oscilliscope.
"I have an ADSL (3M/128k) [...] I don't remember the exact stats from my first download, but they was as bad as this one... Why everyone say bittorent is the next big thing, but I can't get it to seem work correctly?"
You have an asymetric (unequal upload and download) connection. Unless there are tonnes of seeds, your download rate and upload rate will be relatively similar. Because you can only upload 128Kb, you'll almost never get 3 Mb download. This is the inherent nature of bittorrent - it simply works better on connetions where you get equal upload and download.
For bittorrent purposes, it's MUCH better to have a 1Mb/768Kb connection as opposed to a 3Mb/128Kb connection.
"Not really all that amusing, since Torrentse's been down since it got Slashdotted. Congratulations to all the guys who linked to it from here - you've destroyed the best torrent site out there."
Torrentse is down because they are moving to a new server. There was a post about this from the person who runs torrentse in the last story about bittorrent. (I believe it was the story where you could post questions to be used in Bram's interview.)
"I had one convinced that I had to go to Mos Eisley (a local town named after a Confederate general) to sell my speeder (a small vehicle used for farming) to raise the funds for the transaction. (We don't have a bank account. My father, Anakin, lived through the Depression and doesn't trust banks)."
You can find tonnes of stories like this on The Lads of Lagos site. There's even one from me. Some highlights include:
"1% of the largest economy in the world is not exactly chump change. I'm sure GE is comparable to some of the smaller third-world countries, at least."
FYI: As of July 2000, according to Fortune Magazine, GE Corp. has the 40th largest economy in the world.
This is still smaller than Toyota, Exxon-Mobil, the big US Automobile makers, Wal Mart, Finland, Saudi Arabia and Poland.
But it is larger than Portugal, Venezuela, Iran, Israel, Egypt, IBM, Volkswagon and AT&T.
And GE is only 2.6X bigger than the 100th largest economy. But I do believe you're right in saying that 1% of it is similar to some small 3rd world nation.
"Basically, the paper says this: If you have a hash table into which attackers can insert arbitrary keys, you'd better be using a hash function for which they cannot easily generate collisions."
It's publicised. I was warned about stuff like this in a 2nd year CS class I took several months ago. But I did *not* imagine that it could be used to take down web servers.
"This doesn't sit well with me. Should students at a University be studying, developing, and releasing improved methods with which to launch DOS attacks..?"
What, would you have preferred that it appeared on an obscure malicious cracker's board? It's better that academia finds it before irreponsible people who would only use it to take down web sites.
And speaking of DDOS, it looks like the RIAA's site is down again.
"What this means is that you will not be able to JUST get IE, but instead only get it through Windows."
Wasn't that what MSFT was sued for in the first place? They bundle the browser with the monopoly OS in order to stamp out competition? Haven't they learned anything?
Well I guess they have... they have learned that they can get away with it.
" What I am expecting will happen is that IE will be absorbed into the integrated office environment, in the same way the Word/Excel et al are being drawn into just one package.
By bundling everything in together (probably with a mail client), M$ no longer have to worry about the opposition packages. It also would no surprise me to see integrated OS and Office package bundles/licenses, to keep out the competition."
Agreed. And the next step is to convert the centralised package into a client/server model where you just pay a subscription fee to use the software on your dumb-terminal computer. This way, all storage and DRM on the storage is server based.
IMHO, that is MSFT's long term goal because it turns computing into a service/utility like electricity. Then it's easy to force licensing and regulation so that those evil linux zealots will be illegitimized.
"You are missing the point.:-) If Microsoft has their way, there will only be one browser. Detection and customizing your web page for more than one browser will be moot. {sarcasm} All this open source stuff and other browsers will just get in the way. {/sarcasm}"
This is an excellent description of typical Microsoft thinking in general.
Microsoft believes that everyone else should believe that your life will be perfect with no computer or internet related hassles as long as you run the latest version of Microsoft everything. This way, Microsoft owns you, they can make all their rules and charge you heavily for the next revolutionary update that breaks all compatibility with all other products so you'll have to pay for the revolutionary updates of all of those things too.
Basically they want to have you ensnared into a viscious and expensive upgrade cycle of proprietary formats that nothing else can read. Tell THAT to your manager when you are trying to talk them out of a Windows XP rollout.
This is why I have shifted into an 'open standards' type of mindset, where I try to make decisions that do not lock me into windows. That means using openoffice instead of MS Office so I can easily access all docs on Linux or Mac OS X. It means not building anything dependent on MS Access. It means not using.wma. This way, when I am ready to ditch windows for all of my production-level work, the transition will be easy.
"This is hardly incremental. The inclusion of NTLM is a monumental advance. It means I no longer need to use IE on my intranet which uses NTLM for everything."
THANK YOU! I now understand why previous mozilla versions never worked at the office on the corporate network even though I correctly config'd the proxy setup. I know what I'll be downloading come monday morning!
The funniest thing about this story (which is written in German) is that altavista's babelfish translator translates "Nullsoft" assuming it's a German word into "Zero Often" .
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
"Also, although the Mozilla integrated suite takes forever to start up, Firebird/Phoenix is a good deal faster"
Are you sure? On windows with the autostart, it pops onto the screen faster than Opera 7 for me.
"Ask your average person about DRM and they won't have a clue what you are talking about, because it has been implemented so seamlessly. "
In the USA and Canada I would say that that's true. Most people here have not heard of DVD regions. But there aren't a bunch of adjoining countries who have other region numbers. Thus in the USA, it's quite hard to run into a DVD region problem. Can any europeans or asians comment on this? Is awareness of DVD copy protections greater in areas where different regions are connected by land?
"Oh and remember Macrovision? VHS has also had DRM for years and years, it was just much less sophisticated. Still quite difficult to bypass though."
All you need is one of those little 'video stabilizer' boxes you can get at electronics stores for less than $100 and you're home free.
Also, many DV Capture devices will strip Macrovision. If I wanted to do it, I could copy many Disney VHS tapes to VCD quite easily and Macrovision would not be a problem for my Canopus ADVC-100 converter.
"And does that fact necessarily matter to the *AA?"
Depends. If it becomes accessible to the regular joe, and it becomes widely used, say in campus dorms, then yes, the *AA will take notice. If it is such that it requires a little bit of technical skill to set up, then the bar to entry will be raised such that people who want to and do use it for piracy will be few and far between. The *AA will ignore it in that case. This is why Usenet file trading never seems to be attacked - the level of knowledge for entry is too high so it's not accessible to the average joe.
Bram: When is the new version of the Mac OS X client coming out? Supposedly the 3.1 version will be updated 'soon' but it's been stalled for as long as I can remember!
I'd guess that apple is doing this not out of love for the big 5 record labels, but to keep their contracts intact that allow them to distribute tunes through the iTunes music store.
Basically, to satisfy the labels, apple must raise the bar on piracy enough such that the average joe, say 99% and more of the users of the store, cannot easily send the music to anyone.
iTunes made it too easy for total strangers to share music so Apple had to raise the bar of entry. Setting up SSH tunnelling is way too hard for most people. Burning a CD and re-ripping is too annoying for most people, and even such a simple task is beyond the reach of many many folks.
So basically apple has to make easy sharing just slightly out of reach of most people and the tiny minority like you and me who know about SSH and such will be able to share music as usual.
This is why kazaa is attacked and usenet file trading is never attacked. It's too hard for most people to trade files over usenet. Kazaa makes it blindingly easy. Only when piracy is accessible to the average joe does the industry start to take notice.
Hey, keep in mind that even today there are people out there who still get 21.6 kbit/s on their regular dialup connection because they live on a terrible phone loop outside the range of DSL, cable, and don't want stupid one-sided satellite internet that limits the number of connections (i.e. TCP connections) you can have for 2-way servive.
Actually I am 'fortunate' enough to be able to get a 31.2 kbit/s connection on my crappy phone loop. This 14.4 Mbit business makes me feel sad.
"And whoah, fanboy. If I was gonna go lossless, I'd go with with a RIFF wav-- those are compatible with every imaginable program."
Yeah, you say that now. But with FLAC, the files are compressed losslessly, and in my experience, I generally get about a 33% size reduction. And with subtle music with a lot of will placed percussion (e.g. my jazz albums) FLAC does give a noticeable improvement over ogg vorbis encoded at 9.1 quality.
So assuming you'd get about 74 minutes of audio on the standard CD, you'd get 747 MiB of wave files per disc.
Note: CD Audio encoding is different than regular data encoding. You cannot fit 747 MiB of wave files on a CD-R in a regular file 74 or 80 minute system because of redundant error correction data that does not exist in the CD Audio format.
So with a 20 GiB Neuros Audio Player you would be able to fit 27.4 CDs on one player. With FLAC, assuming a 33% file size reduction, you would be able to get 40.9 CDs onto the player.
Lossless support in the Neuros player IS a big deal because it allows you to put a significantly larger quantity of non-lossy music on it. And furthermore, if you want, you can just convert the FLAC back to RIFF wave format whenever you want because, one again, the conversion is lossless in both directions.
"The share sales amount to one of the biggest one-off disposals ever made by a chief executive, although they still leave Mr Ballmer with some $10bn worth of stock in the company.
Microsoft said the sales were undertaken so that Mr Ballmer could diversify his financial interests."
Doesn't this guy ever read Dilbert? As best as I can remember, this is how I went
Dilbert: The CEO just sold off a lot of his shares of the company. Does this mean we are in trouble?
PHB: No, he's just diversifying his portfolio.
Dilbert: Oh, that's alright then.
PHB: (Madly typing at computer.) Thought bubble: "Sell!...Sell!...SELL!!!"
" If humidity is really low in your area (which, if you live on the coast, is probably NOT the case!) A simple evaporative cooler can run with a supply of water and very little (or possibly no) electricity."
I used something like this once for the purpose of keeping the room at a decent humidity, because a place I was renting had friggin' dry air. As a side effect, it did cool down the room quite a lot. (Alas, it was the winter and an undesired side effect.)
I bought one of these 'cool air humidifiers' for CDN$50 at Future Shop (which is now owned by Worst Buy.) These are not to be mistaken for 'warm air humidifiers'. There are tons of models out there from various companies. I suggest you check out your nearest 'home improvement' type store (building box, home depot, etc.) and see their selection.
The only downside about them is that you have to clean them once a week which involved vinegar and a small amount of bleach. If you're not careful, you can easily leak water over everything during cleaning. Also, you've got to get a new filter once or twice a year. More often if you have hard water. And yes, it does work fine with hard water.
For your situation, I'd suggest you get one, and leave it running on 'low' most of the time. The higher settings are kind of noisy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a paper planner and an ink pen is the best way to go, even better than a PDA.
On the planner you can scribble little maps, chemical structures, notes, etc, without resolution or colour limitations of a PDA screen. And it never runs out of power. You don't have to worry about crushing it or bending it. You can toss it around and not have to worry about scratching it. If you shop around, you can get a good one with one page per day for 10 dollars or less. There is no decent PDA for less than 10 dollars.
And about taking notes: Laptops are not such a good idea as they first seem to be. They don't fit very well on those little tablets in lecture halls. You always have to worry about someone else knocking it over and when the prof pulls out a diagram to show you, it's hard to transpose that onto a laptop. (The exception is profs that are cool enough to give you downloadable lecture templates beforehand that you just fill in.) (Although I did see one guy with a digicam for that purpose.)
Some people try to solve this problem by bringing PDAs to lectures but then they either get snarled by slow stylus data entry, or find out that the little writing tables on the lecture hall chairs is not wide enough to support their plam keyboard device. And they will be again out of luck of there is a diagram.
Now if you're in a discipline that doesn't require many diagrams, a tablet comptuer might work. But I am in engineering and there are always tonnes of little diagrams showing the setup for some type of problems. You've gotta have paper.
What laptops and PDAs are good for: Laboratory Experiments. It is a royal pain to be in a group of 4 people doing a lab experiment and one person scribbles all the results down on a piece of paper. Just try getting them to type out the results and send them on e-mail. They won't do it most of the time. So then you have to go on a wild goose chase to find the person to get the piece of paper and then photocopy it, but then you can't read their writing or it was too light to photocopy. If you type your results into a PDA you avoid any hadwriting problems and it can be distributed instantaneously. And digicams are an absolute luxury when they want you to show a diagram of an image on an oscilliscope.
You have an asymetric (unequal upload and download) connection. Unless there are tonnes of seeds, your download rate and upload rate will be relatively similar. Because you can only upload 128Kb, you'll almost never get 3 Mb download. This is the inherent nature of bittorrent - it simply works better on connetions where you get equal upload and download.
For bittorrent purposes, it's MUCH better to have a 1Mb/768Kb connection as opposed to a 3Mb/128Kb connection.
Torrentse is down because they are moving to a new server. There was a post about this from the person who runs torrentse in the last story about bittorrent. (I believe it was the story where you could post questions to be used in Bram's interview.)
Go here to get it http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/bittorrent/
How in the world did you get that past the lameness filter? It's all in caps!
You can find tonnes of stories like this on The Lads of Lagos site. There's even one from me. Some highlights include:
THE LADS FROM BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein & Chemical Ali need your help?
WE WANTS IT, PRECIOUS - Lord of the Rings version
THE LADS MEET SANTA CLAUS - he's making a list, he's checking it twice
WHERE NO LAD HAS GONE BEFORE - Collins Abu demands an apology from Capt. Kirk
THE DUMBEST CRIMINAL ON THE PLANET - Kindly Contributor in Philippines GETS $3 from a Lad
FYI: As of July 2000, according to Fortune Magazine, GE Corp. has the 40th largest economy in the world.
This is still smaller than Toyota, Exxon-Mobil, the big US Automobile makers, Wal Mart, Finland, Saudi Arabia and Poland.
But it is larger than Portugal, Venezuela, Iran, Israel, Egypt, IBM, Volkswagon and AT&T.
And GE is only 2.6X bigger than the 100th largest economy. But I do believe you're right in saying that 1% of it is similar to some small 3rd world nation.
It's publicised. I was warned about stuff like this in a 2nd year CS class I took several months ago. But I did *not* imagine that it could be used to take down web servers.
What, would you have preferred that it appeared on an obscure malicious cracker's board? It's better that academia finds it before irreponsible people who would only use it to take down web sites.
And speaking of DDOS, it looks like the RIAA's site is down again.
Wasn't that what MSFT was sued for in the first place? They bundle the browser with the monopoly OS in order to stamp out competition? Haven't they learned anything?
Well I guess they have ... they have learned that they can get away with it.
Agreed. And the next step is to convert the centralised package into a client/server model where you just pay a subscription fee to use the software on your dumb-terminal computer. This way, all storage and DRM on the storage is server based.
IMHO, that is MSFT's long term goal because it turns computing into a service/utility like electricity. Then it's easy to force licensing and regulation so that those evil linux zealots will be illegitimized.
This is an excellent description of typical Microsoft thinking in general.
Microsoft believes that everyone else should believe that your life will be perfect with no computer or internet related hassles as long as you run the latest version of Microsoft everything. This way, Microsoft owns you, they can make all their rules and charge you heavily for the next revolutionary update that breaks all compatibility with all other products so you'll have to pay for the revolutionary updates of all of those things too.
Basically they want to have you ensnared into a viscious and expensive upgrade cycle of proprietary formats that nothing else can read. Tell THAT to your manager when you are trying to talk them out of a Windows XP rollout.
This is why I have shifted into an 'open standards' type of mindset, where I try to make decisions that do not lock me into windows. That means using openoffice instead of MS Office so I can easily access all docs on Linux or Mac OS X. It means not building anything dependent on MS Access. It means not using .wma. This way, when I am ready to ditch windows for all of my production-level work, the transition will be easy.
THANK YOU! I now understand why previous mozilla versions never worked at the office on the corporate network even though I correctly config'd the proxy setup. I know what I'll be downloading come monday morning!
The funniest thing about this story (which is written in German) is that altavista's babelfish translator translates "Nullsoft" assuming it's a German word into "Zero Often" .
Are you sure? On windows with the autostart, it pops onto the screen faster than Opera 7 for me.
In the USA and Canada I would say that that's true. Most people here have not heard of DVD regions. But there aren't a bunch of adjoining countries who have other region numbers. Thus in the USA, it's quite hard to run into a DVD region problem. Can any europeans or asians comment on this? Is awareness of DVD copy protections greater in areas where different regions are connected by land?
"Oh and remember Macrovision? VHS has also had DRM for years and years, it was just much less sophisticated. Still quite difficult to bypass though."
All you need is one of those little 'video stabilizer' boxes you can get at electronics stores for less than $100 and you're home free.
Also, many DV Capture devices will strip Macrovision. If I wanted to do it, I could copy many Disney VHS tapes to VCD quite easily and Macrovision would not be a problem for my Canopus ADVC-100 converter.
"And does that fact necessarily matter to the *AA?"
Depends. If it becomes accessible to the regular joe, and it becomes widely used, say in campus dorms, then yes, the *AA will take notice. If it is such that it requires a little bit of technical skill to set up, then the bar to entry will be raised such that people who want to and do use it for piracy will be few and far between. The *AA will ignore it in that case. This is why Usenet file trading never seems to be attacked - the level of knowledge for entry is too high so it's not accessible to the average joe.
How do you know this? Are you developing it? If so I can help beta test it if you want.
Bram: When is the new version of the Mac OS X client coming out? Supposedly the 3.1 version will be updated 'soon' but it's been stalled for as long as I can remember!
Basically, to satisfy the labels, apple must raise the bar on piracy enough such that the average joe, say 99% and more of the users of the store, cannot easily send the music to anyone.
iTunes made it too easy for total strangers to share music so Apple had to raise the bar of entry. Setting up SSH tunnelling is way too hard for most people. Burning a CD and re-ripping is too annoying for most people, and even such a simple task is beyond the reach of many many folks.
So basically apple has to make easy sharing just slightly out of reach of most people and the tiny minority like you and me who know about SSH and such will be able to share music as usual.
This is why kazaa is attacked and usenet file trading is never attacked. It's too hard for most people to trade files over usenet. Kazaa makes it blindingly easy. Only when piracy is accessible to the average joe does the industry start to take notice.
Actually I am 'fortunate' enough to be able to get a 31.2 kbit/s connection on my crappy phone loop. This 14.4 Mbit business makes me feel sad.
Whoops... here's a slightly better link about MiB and GiB: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
Yeah, you say that now. But with FLAC, the files are compressed losslessly, and in my experience, I generally get about a 33% size reduction. And with subtle music with a lot of will placed percussion (e.g. my jazz albums) FLAC does give a noticeable improvement over ogg vorbis encoded at 9.1 quality.
So assuming you'd get about 74 minutes of audio on the standard CD, you'd get 747 MiB of wave files per disc.
Note: CD Audio encoding is different than regular data encoding. You cannot fit 747 MiB of wave files on a CD-R in a regular file 74 or 80 minute system because of redundant error correction data that does not exist in the CD Audio format.
So with a 20 GiB Neuros Audio Player you would be able to fit 27.4 CDs on one player. With FLAC, assuming a 33% file size reduction, you would be able to get 40.9 CDs onto the player.
Lossless support in the Neuros player IS a big deal because it allows you to put a significantly larger quantity of non-lossy music on it. And furthermore, if you want, you can just convert the FLAC back to RIFF wave format whenever you want because, one again, the conversion is lossless in both directions.
Microsoft said the sales were undertaken so that Mr Ballmer could diversify his financial interests."
Doesn't this guy ever read Dilbert? As best as I can remember, this is how I went
Dilbert: The CEO just sold off a lot of his shares of the company. Does this mean we are in trouble?
PHB: No, he's just diversifying his portfolio.
Dilbert: Oh, that's alright then.
PHB: (Madly typing at computer.) Thought bubble: "Sell!...Sell!...SELL!!!"
I used something like this once for the purpose of keeping the room at a decent humidity, because a place I was renting had friggin' dry air. As a side effect, it did cool down the room quite a lot. (Alas, it was the winter and an undesired side effect.)
I bought one of these 'cool air humidifiers' for CDN$50 at Future Shop (which is now owned by Worst Buy.) These are not to be mistaken for 'warm air humidifiers'. There are tons of models out there from various companies. I suggest you check out your nearest 'home improvement' type store (building box, home depot, etc.) and see their selection.
The only downside about them is that you have to clean them once a week which involved vinegar and a small amount of bleach. If you're not careful, you can easily leak water over everything during cleaning. Also, you've got to get a new filter once or twice a year. More often if you have hard water. And yes, it does work fine with hard water.
For your situation, I'd suggest you get one, and leave it running on 'low' most of the time. The higher settings are kind of noisy.