1) Does it matter? I'm avoiding TurboTax in any form because of the general array of bad behavior they're pursuing.
2) Yes, H&R Block's TaxCut for OS X is decent, although the help system is a bit broken on my install. (Every "What if I do this?" Link pops up a window that says- no topics available)
3) I agree, but I'm much more worried about my credit card numbers, purchases, and Quicken information. It really annoyed me when I updated Quicken one day and it absolutely refused to let me back into the program until I signed up for a Quicken Online account which touted the benefits of syncing my data to Quicken's servers. I turned the feature off, but I can't believe this is the default. GNUCash is looking more and more attractive.
The only thing that might make those Win32 machines safe is that they present absolutely zero challenge.
I briefly worked on the MIT I/S project to bring Windows to public clusters. The project's official name was "Pismere", latin for horse piss. The test servers were named "frequently-down" and "data-loss". Needless to say, we all considered the project to be an enormous security risk.
I remember finding a nice proof of concept of a security hole when I was there. Found a web site that displayed an image saying "if you see this, I can get your username and password, click here". I clicked, and 2 minutes later the target page refreshed with my username and password! This was 1999, the web wasn't exactly new.
The standard athena unix boxes have a fairly impressive (although certainly not impenetrable) set of defenses. There's a tripwire type system that runs on user logout and disables the system if anything funny is detected. Admins then fix the box by reinstalling from a network server (completely automated).
(for those who are interested, the exploit was accomplished by pointing an IMG tag to a file on a SMB share that was running a hacked version of Samba. The Samba server would claim it didn't understand the modern authentication methods and request a LanManager style login. Windows LanManager password hashes had a flaw that made them fairly easy to reverse.)
Easy to use (menus and buttons until you learn the keystrokes).
The Installshield installer the folks at www.xemacs.org provide gives you a very capable editor without any painful configuration. Default editing modes are pre-bound to most common file formats.
I remember a great article on burning CDs in an audiophile magazine.
After the expected disclaimers about the limited quality of CDs, etc, they proceeded to review the options for media, burners, configuration options, etc. Then, as expected, came the result of their listening tests. Although the differences were subtle, the best quality was obtained by using the most expensive drive, with the most expensive gold media, set on 1x recording speed.
The kicker came near the end, where the author noted that "even though all of the CDs we burned were bit-for-bit identical when compared on our computer, the bits on CDs produced with less expensive recorders or at higher recording speeds had dirtier edges, and repeated copying further degraded the quality of the bits".
Car navigation systems, laser pointers
on
Targeted Sound Beams
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I played with this at Bose a few years ago, and it's very disorienting at first. Pompei may have taken this further than the prototype I saw, but the version I played with essentially created audible sound coming from the point where the ultrasound beam reflected off of a surface.
It's very odd to play with one of these things. We put on a CD and started waving the ultrasound array (housed in a flashlight body) around the room. I felt disoriented pretty quickly as my brain tried to figure out where the sound it coming from.
One of the more interesting effects, as mentioned in the article, is pointing the array at someone's head and turning the volume down. Only the target can hear, because it's essentially like having a headphone on. The sound it's generating is simply too quiet to hear unless you're less than a few centimeters from the source.
My favorite application for this is car navigation systems. I like the idea of a GPS navigation system that can give spoken directions to the driver without bothering all of the passengers in the car.
Just imagine- some day these things could be as common and annoying as laser pointers. Imagine walking down the street with some teenager 200m away whispering in your ear. It's going to be ugly.
Lots of comments have been talking about this thing like it's some kind of Razor scooter with a motor on it. I think you're missing the point. For those who have never seen Kamen's wheelchair, it's amazing what a difference sophisticated control systems can make.
The gyros in Kamen's wheelchair are tied into a negative feedback control system that balances the vehicle. In the wheelchair's case, this means it can lift itself up on 2 wheels and drive around that way. You can even give a rider a push while the chair is up on two wheels without any danger of tipping them over. The control system responds just as a person would, by briefly backing up to regain equilibrium.
The Segway looks light enough and clean enough to be taken indoors and brought on mass transit. If it is practical to handle and easy to learn, this could become a regular part of some people's commute.
Don't dismiss a new technology / product before you have any real information about it. The personal computer could have been dismissed much more easily than this thing based on the devices that came before it, and the inability to forsee that seemingly minor changes could result in an entirely different use pattern for computers.
I look forward to the first in-person review we see on Slashdot.
Re:WinXP has name completion by default
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
Want to see something REALLY frightening on Windows 2000? (and possibly other versions, but I've never tried)
Make a directory. Make two files, such as:
one.html
two.htm
Type del *.htm
Yup, that's right, they're both gone. Remember that feature where Windows allows you to use 8.3 versions of file names?
I can understand how a magnetic non-metal could be written to with a laser (briefly heating a spot above the curie point I assume), but it's not clear that you can read with the same mechanism.
Could someone with a real grasp of the physics take a guess at the mechanisms they're hinting at?
For that matter, what do we do with memory with exceptional write performance, but dismal read performance. I'm sure there are some scientific and data acquisition applications that could benefit.
Solaris isn't just for servers. There's lots of software out there that doesn't exist for Linux / other Unices. The oil industry, for example, is one of the largest users of computing horsepower. For a long time, it used to be the largest, but that may have changed. Lots of geophysical software exists only for Sparc Solaris.
Anyone who's dealt much with Sun's workstation class machines knows they don't make the best servers in the world, but there's still a huge market for their Ultra 5/10 and Blade 100/1000 machines. CDE is a real obstacle to new users on these machines.
If I didn't have several days invested in my.fvwm2rc file, I'd go for KDE or Gnome myself.
BTW- MIT's Athena 9.0 was released recently running Gnome on Solaris Sparc. Sorry, it's MIT specific (lots of site licenses bundled into the release).
I agree wholeheartedly with the complaints about lack of information on testing methodology. It's a shame to gather a panel of experts and then ruin your results by telling them what they're listening to. It's a real waste of these people's time, even if they don't know it. Should have been a blind test at the very least.
On the other hand, the comment about loss of spaciousness showed some insight. One of the things most of these lossy formats don't preserve is the phase information between channels. Phase is one of the factors in the human auditory system's "imaging" sense, that is, it's ability to guess where a sound is coming from. Understanding of psycoacoustics is still fairly limited, with lots of clues as to what's going on, but no complete picture.
I worked at Bose a few years ago, and they had some very interesting demos involving sound imaging. Several demos involving only 2 drivers that seemed to very clearly move sounds around you such that you could point to precisely where you thought the sound came from. The recording methodology is very important for this kind of effect though.
My personal experience is that with good headphones (studio reference units), my untrained ear can hear the problems in MP3 at 128 kbits, but probably not at 192. Considering how rarely I listen to music under these pristine conditions, I'll live with MP3 until something better and universally supported comes along.
You don't need another client to do checkouts. TortoiseCVS can't create new root level modules, but you may not want the uninitiated doing that anyway.
Almost forgot- CVS handles binaries just fine. Add -kb entries to cvswrapper for binary file types to instruct CVS to turn off linefeed conversion and ignore special CVS tags.
Check out TortoiseCVS from the CVSHome website. It's an add-on to Windows Explorer that adds status dependent color shading to CVS controled directories and context sensitive commands to the Explorer file menu. Comes with a bundled SSH client for secure tunneling.
Easy to install and VERY easy to use, and no, I don't have anything to do with the project. I just use it.
I always thought the entire point of the Apache and BSD licenses was along these lines. The highest form of altruism is that which expects nothing in return (not even recognition).
Granted, it would be nice to see Apple open up things like FreeType and QuickTime, and I hope that they will. Goodwill along these lines to the open source community could pay off big time in recipricoral support from the open source community. Maybe this experiment with opening up thrie source (Darwin) will pay off and convince some Apple execs to expand their participation.
In the mean time, hundreds of open source contributors get the satisfaction of knowing that their work has reached a wider audience, and that their grandmother's new iMac will be a better, more stable machine thanks to their work.
First of all, an experiment:
Take a CD / CDR with known good data. Take out your keys. Carve a good scratch into the data surface. Put it in the drive and check the integrity of your data. Yup, it's still there (probably). CDs already incorporate ECC (error correcting codes) similar to RAID.
The real question in my mind is the time durability of your media. People make different claims about CD-Rs, but you can probably count on a minimum of 30 years if you store these things in a box in the dark (the dyes are photo sensitive).
Magnetic media, on the other hand, tends to have a much shorter life span. Think about where you're going to find a tape drive in 20 years. You're much more likely to find something that reads CDs, because they're a consumer technology (and because CD-ROM's can have virtually indefinite shelf lives).
Stick with CD-R / DVD-R, but think about your migration strategies. And you can't beat RAID for on-line storage.
You wouldn't. I've never had a problem with relativly recent (less than 5 year old) non-sun monitors on the newer Sun graphics cards.
If you intend to use one of these as a server, you don't even need a monitor. If you boot a sparc without a keyboard, it opens up its first serial port for terminal access. Get a serial cable, hook it to your desktop, and fire up a terminal emulator. You can even install this way. I've never owned a monitor for my old sparc 20.
I picked up an Ultra 5 on a student deal last year. $1200 for a 360 Mhz system w/ 10 gig EIDE, 128MB ram, etc. Some of the best money I've ever spent on my education. There's nothing like having a private box to repeatedly mess up to learn the guts of a platform.
Comparing Mhz on different architectures is like comparing RPM on different engine designs. Sure, the numbers are vaguely related to performance, but my Ford Aspire with its blender of an engine probably puts out less power red-lining than some trucks do when they're idleing.
Sun pulls all kinds of cool tricks like memory striping, and don't forget that we're talking about a 64-bit (sparc) vs. 32-bit (x86) processor. Your milage may vary, but my experience has been that my Ultra 5 runs circles around my P3-650 on most data intensive tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Three answers:
1) Does it matter? I'm avoiding TurboTax in any form because of the general array of bad behavior they're pursuing.
2) Yes, H&R Block's TaxCut for OS X is decent, although the help system is a bit broken on my install. (Every "What if I do this?" Link pops up a window that says- no topics available)
3) I agree, but I'm much more worried about my credit card numbers, purchases, and Quicken information. It really annoyed me when I updated Quicken one day and it absolutely refused to let me back into the program until I signed up for a Quicken Online account which touted the benefits of syncing my data to Quicken's servers. I turned the feature off, but I can't believe this is the default. GNUCash is looking more and more attractive.
The only thing that might make those Win32 machines safe is that they present absolutely zero challenge.
I briefly worked on the MIT I/S project to bring Windows to public clusters. The project's official name was "Pismere", latin for horse piss. The test servers were named "frequently-down" and "data-loss". Needless to say, we all considered the project to be an enormous security risk.
I remember finding a nice proof of concept of a security hole when I was there. Found a web site that displayed an image saying "if you see this, I can get your username and password, click here". I clicked, and 2 minutes later the target page refreshed with my username and password! This was 1999, the web wasn't exactly new.
The standard athena unix boxes have a fairly impressive (although certainly not impenetrable) set of defenses. There's a tripwire type system that runs on user logout and disables the system if anything funny is detected. Admins then fix the box by reinstalling from a network server (completely automated).
(for those who are interested, the exploit was accomplished by pointing an IMG tag to a file on a SMB share that was running a hacked version of Samba. The Samba server would claim it didn't understand the modern authentication methods and request a LanManager style login. Windows LanManager password hashes had a flaw that made them fairly easy to reverse.)
> January 26th:
> PowerLabs was featured on a ZZZ Article;
> traffic triples (now at 4000+ hits/day).
Let's see what he's learned about scalable designs. I guess Slashdot is going to be part of the "+".
Emacs JDE mode does all of this out of the box.
Code completeion works for JRE, classpath, or custom classes, and ant integration is built in.
Easy to use (menus and buttons until you learn the keystrokes).
The Installshield installer the folks at www.xemacs.org provide gives you a very capable editor without any painful configuration. Default editing modes are pre-bound to most common file formats.
I remember a great article on burning CDs in an audiophile magazine.
After the expected disclaimers about the limited quality of CDs, etc, they proceeded to review the options for media, burners, configuration options, etc. Then, as expected, came the result of their listening tests. Although the differences were subtle, the best quality was obtained by using the most expensive drive, with the most expensive gold media, set on 1x recording speed.
The kicker came near the end, where the author noted that "even though all of the CDs we burned were bit-for-bit identical when compared on our computer, the bits on CDs produced with less expensive recorders or at higher recording speeds had dirtier edges, and repeated copying further degraded the quality of the bits".
I played with this at Bose a few years ago, and it's very disorienting at first. Pompei may have taken this further than the prototype I saw, but the version I played with essentially created audible sound coming from the point where the ultrasound beam reflected off of a surface.
It's very odd to play with one of these things. We put on a CD and started waving the ultrasound array (housed in a flashlight body) around the room. I felt disoriented pretty quickly as my brain tried to figure out where the sound it coming from.
One of the more interesting effects, as mentioned in the article, is pointing the array at someone's head and turning the volume down. Only the target can hear, because it's essentially like having a headphone on. The sound it's generating is simply too quiet to hear unless you're less than a few centimeters from the source.
My favorite application for this is car navigation systems. I like the idea of a GPS navigation system that can give spoken directions to the driver without bothering all of the passengers in the car.
Just imagine- some day these things could be as common and annoying as laser pointers. Imagine walking down the street with some teenager 200m away whispering in your ear. It's going to be ugly.
The sound a Mac makes when you turn it on.
Lots of comments have been talking about this thing like it's some kind of Razor scooter with a motor on it. I think you're missing the point. For those who have never seen Kamen's wheelchair, it's amazing what a difference sophisticated control systems can make.
The gyros in Kamen's wheelchair are tied into a negative feedback control system that balances the vehicle. In the wheelchair's case, this means it can lift itself up on 2 wheels and drive around that way. You can even give a rider a push while the chair is up on two wheels without any danger of tipping them over. The control system responds just as a person would, by briefly backing up to regain equilibrium.
The Segway looks light enough and clean enough to be taken indoors and brought on mass transit. If it is practical to handle and easy to learn, this could become a regular part of some people's commute.
Don't dismiss a new technology / product before you have any real information about it. The personal computer could have been dismissed much more easily than this thing based on the devices that came before it, and the inability to forsee that seemingly minor changes could result in an entirely different use pattern for computers.
I look forward to the first in-person review we see on Slashdot.
Want to see something REALLY frightening on Windows 2000? (and possibly other versions, but I've never tried)
Make a directory. Make two files, such as:
one.html
two.htm
Type del *.htm
Yup, that's right, they're both gone. Remember that feature where Windows allows you to use 8.3 versions of file names?
I can understand how a magnetic non-metal could be written to with a laser (briefly heating a spot above the curie point I assume), but it's not clear that you can read with the same mechanism. Could someone with a real grasp of the physics take a guess at the mechanisms they're hinting at? For that matter, what do we do with memory with exceptional write performance, but dismal read performance. I'm sure there are some scientific and data acquisition applications that could benefit.
Solaris isn't just for servers. There's lots of software out there that doesn't exist for Linux / other Unices. The oil industry, for example, is one of the largest users of computing horsepower. For a long time, it used to be the largest, but that may have changed. Lots of geophysical software exists only for Sparc Solaris.
.fvwm2rc file, I'd go for KDE or Gnome myself.
Anyone who's dealt much with Sun's workstation class machines knows they don't make the best servers in the world, but there's still a huge market for their Ultra 5/10 and Blade 100/1000 machines. CDE is a real obstacle to new users on these machines.
If I didn't have several days invested in my
BTW- MIT's Athena 9.0 was released recently running Gnome on Solaris Sparc. Sorry, it's MIT specific (lots of site licenses bundled into the release).
I agree wholeheartedly with the complaints about lack of information on testing methodology. It's a shame to gather a panel of experts and then ruin your results by telling them what they're listening to. It's a real waste of these people's time, even if they don't know it. Should have been a blind test at the very least.
On the other hand, the comment about loss of spaciousness showed some insight. One of the things most of these lossy formats don't preserve is the phase information between channels. Phase is one of the factors in the human auditory system's "imaging" sense, that is, it's ability to guess where a sound is coming from. Understanding of psycoacoustics is still fairly limited, with lots of clues as to what's going on, but no complete picture.
I worked at Bose a few years ago, and they had some very interesting demos involving sound imaging. Several demos involving only 2 drivers that seemed to very clearly move sounds around you such that you could point to precisely where you thought the sound came from. The recording methodology is very important for this kind of effect though.
My personal experience is that with good headphones (studio reference units), my untrained ear can hear the problems in MP3 at 128 kbits, but probably not at 192. Considering how rarely I listen to music under these pristine conditions, I'll live with MP3 until something better and universally supported comes along.
You don't need another client to do checkouts. TortoiseCVS can't create new root level modules, but you may not want the uninitiated doing that anyway.
Almost forgot- CVS handles binaries just fine. Add -kb entries to cvswrapper for binary file types to instruct CVS to turn off linefeed conversion and ignore special CVS tags.
Check out TortoiseCVS from the CVSHome website. It's an add-on to Windows Explorer that adds status dependent color shading to CVS controled directories and context sensitive commands to the Explorer file menu. Comes with a bundled SSH client for secure tunneling.
Easy to install and VERY easy to use, and no, I don't have anything to do with the project. I just use it.
I always thought the entire point of the Apache and BSD licenses was along these lines. The highest form of altruism is that which expects nothing in return (not even recognition).
Granted, it would be nice to see Apple open up things like FreeType and QuickTime, and I hope that they will. Goodwill along these lines to the open source community could pay off big time in recipricoral support from the open source community. Maybe this experiment with opening up thrie source (Darwin) will pay off and convince some Apple execs to expand their participation.
In the mean time, hundreds of open source contributors get the satisfaction of knowing that their work has reached a wider audience, and that their grandmother's new iMac will be a better, more stable machine thanks to their work.
Couple of things...
First of all, an experiment:
Take a CD / CDR with known good data. Take out your keys. Carve a good scratch into the data surface. Put it in the drive and check the integrity of your data. Yup, it's still there (probably). CDs already incorporate ECC (error correcting codes) similar to RAID.
The real question in my mind is the time durability of your media. People make different claims about CD-Rs, but you can probably count on a minimum of 30 years if you store these things in a box in the dark (the dyes are photo sensitive).
Magnetic media, on the other hand, tends to have a much shorter life span. Think about where you're going to find a tape drive in 20 years. You're much more likely to find something that reads CDs, because they're a consumer technology (and because CD-ROM's can have virtually indefinite shelf lives).
Stick with CD-R / DVD-R, but think about your migration strategies. And you can't beat RAID for on-line storage.
You wouldn't. I've never had a problem with relativly recent (less than 5 year old) non-sun monitors on the newer Sun graphics cards.
If you intend to use one of these as a server, you don't even need a monitor. If you boot a sparc without a keyboard, it opens up its first serial port for terminal access. Get a serial cable, hook it to your desktop, and fire up a terminal emulator. You can even install this way. I've never owned a monitor for my old sparc 20.
The memory, on the other hand, isn't the same.
I picked up an Ultra 5 on a student deal last year. $1200 for a 360 Mhz system w/ 10 gig EIDE, 128MB ram, etc. Some of the best money I've ever spent on my education. There's nothing like having a private box to repeatedly mess up to learn the guts of a platform.
Comparing Mhz on different architectures is like comparing RPM on different engine designs. Sure, the numbers are vaguely related to performance, but my Ford Aspire with its blender of an engine probably puts out less power red-lining than some trucks do when they're idleing.
Sun pulls all kinds of cool tricks like memory striping, and don't forget that we're talking about a 64-bit (sparc) vs. 32-bit (x86) processor. Your milage may vary, but my experience has been that my Ultra 5 runs circles around my P3-650 on most data intensive tasks.