I hadn't thought of that, actually. I was talking about the distro's name, "Hikarunix". It's a reference to the anime Hikaru no Go. The title character is taught to play Go by Sai, the restless spirit of an ancient Go master.
What he was talking about is the "tab" paradigm used by OmniWeb 5.0. This paradigm doesn't actually use tabs at all; rather, it's a drawer filled with thumbnails of the sites on it. You can typically fit four or five thumbnails into the drawer before needing to scroll.
Very pretty, but not nearly as useful in the real world; the thumbnails add less than you'd think and there's even less room for sites in the drawer than there is on a toolbar. I'm glad that Camino went with actual tabs.
Two-factor is indeed based on something you have and something you know. But "something you know" isn't your username; that's "something you are". "Something you know" is, in fact, your password.
Two-factor authentication actually has three factors. The username part is so insecure, however, that no one really counts it, because everyone has to know it in order to do any business with you at all. Many graphical login managers even present a list of usernames, because keeping these secret hampers the system's usability -no one knows who anyone is- for no real security gain.
The user-memorized password is not "an artifact of an older system"; it is still an important part of security, It is no longer the only important part of the security process, but it retains its importance.
All media is biased, one way or another. The only differences are in direction and how honest the media outlets are about their biases.
This said, the best thing to do is try and research the same subject from multiple sources with as diverse a set of biases as possible. The truth will be somewhere in the middle of the biases you find.
Are these censored, or were they simply not picked up the outlets which the writers had wanted so desperately to appear in?
There is a huge difference. I read several of the aforementioned articles during their original runs. No laws were passed banning them, and the US government never made any attempt to stop their runs. Therefore, no censorship.
True censorship exists in this world. It seems to me, however, that this list is nothing more than a couple of authors whining about their stories not running as widely as they had wanted.
Should it not be possible to include bibliographies in entries? The entire Wiki might not be deemed authoritative in this way, but an entry with a decent bibliography might be considered valid on its own.
Of course, I'm not sure anyone has tried doing bibliographies in Wiki markup before; it may take some extension to the standard. Still, I don't think it would be a bad idea.
Has a collision been found yet concerning data which has both the same MD5 sum and the same SHA-1 sum?
It would seem as though even if SHA-1 were to fail, the two algorithms used together could bolster each other security-wise. This slows things down, of course, but would it not suffice for the time being?
The lawyers do ask, but they don't have to. It's a matter of courtesy more than anything else.
There's at least one instance, "Amish Paradise", where the original artist (Coolio) denied permission and Weird Al went ahead with it anyway. As it turns out, several Amish communities were also horribly offended by the song, but it's against their beliefs to sue him, so they haven't done anything about it.
Selling off the profitable divisions to concentrate on the money-losing portion? What business-management professor taught them that trick, and why does this professor still have a job?
Free speech doesn't allow you to run protection rackets, so why this? It's the same thing, if you think about it: sending popups with a promise to stop if you're paid. The only differences are in degree and scale.
Not that this is going to do anything to prevent people from sending backdoor popups; nothing ever does. However, it does allow people to drop the hammer on those who continue this practice.
Actually, the PNG folks do have an animation standard: MNG. In fact, it's in many ways superior, because it can support lossless or lossy compression (JNG).
Unfortunately, by making it an optional part of the standard, they ensured that browsers wouldn't support it. Even Mozilla doesn't support it anymore.
You'll notice that cities which are fairly close together do have integrated rail systems. But the US as a whole is simply too large and too sparsely populated for rail to work well on a national scale.
Rail's not terribly flexible: you can only go where there is a line, and the lines themselves are expensive to run. This is not a problem for relatively densely-populated areas, because you're guaranteed of having enough people everywhere that running that many rails is viable. In sparsely-populated areas, however, there's simply no viable way to run rails everywhere that people go, because there aren't enough people going everywhere to support all those lines. If they don't go everywhere, then people won't use them.
I'm not so sure about that. The whole point of checks and balances is that each branch has some powers over the other two, but the other branches have powers over it as well.
Let's take the Supreme Court, for example. You're probably referring to the power of judicial review: the ability to declare laws unconstitutional (this was actually never codified in the Constitution; it's an important legal tradition and perhaps ought to be codfied, but it is not). This is, in fact, a very important power. However, it is not unbalanced:
1) Congress can override SCOTUS decisions. It takes a Constitutional amendment to do so (making the law constitutional by changing the Constitution to suit), and so it is very difficult, but it can be done.
2) The executive branch appoints justices. It's a little-known fact that even SCOTUS justices can be impeached and removed from office, even though they otherwise hold life terms; this has never been done, but it is possible.
3) The SCOTUS cannot act of its own volition; it must be called upon before it can do anything. The Executive and legislative branches have limited power, but they can use (most of) those powers at will; the SCOTUS is powerless unless actually called on by one of the other branches, or by the people.
This is the whole point of checks and balances: no one branch is self-policing, no one branch has unlimited power, and most of the actions of one branch can be undone (though not easily) by at least one of the other branches. The idea is to fight corruption on two fronts: one, by reducing its ability to form, and two, limiting its ability to do damage even when it does form. It's actually a pretty well-designed system, at least on that score.
The exact same situation occurred in Firefox 0.9, which also failed to handle it gracefully. Frankly, it's things like this which make me wonder (with great fear) that the Mozilla team's commitment to the Mac may be faltering. These fixes would have been borderline-trivial to implement, at least in the settings import wizard if not automatically.
I may be daft, but I still don't get it. If it acts as a access point, then how does it get internet/LAN connectivity without either an Ethernet (wired) connection (so why bother?) or by wirelessly repeating an AEBS connection. How else can you do this? Two possibilities here.
One, it has an Ethernet port, which -although it could go into an iBook- could also go into a switch, or a broadband device (DSL/Cable/whatever), or possibly even another machine.
Two, if the house doesn't have an Internet connection -unlikely, but possible- then it needs no Internet access anyway.
Three, I find it unlikely that the device can't be configured to bridge other networks. It's entirely possible that it cannot be automatically configured to do so -I'd bet that Apple's solution to this problem depends on Rendezvous- but since we know that it has a remote configuration interface for both Mac and Windows (and someone released a Java configuration util for the original AirPort, so presumably this could be done again), it has to be configurable by some means.
Well that's all nice and well -- but do you already have an Apple base station? If not, expect to spend up big getting your "Wifi extender". According to the specs posted -- "AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network. " -- translation - if you want to use this for wireless iTunes streaming, then you will need to also have purchased an Apple airport in order to NOT to have to run an Ethernet cable to the Airport Express.
Um, no. Read the specs more closely next time.
If you are using AE as a range-extender, then yes, it does require an AEBS. However, it can also act as its own base station/access point/whatever, with the caveat that it only supports up to ten devices (the AEBS supports up to 50).
Of course, from the look of things, you can also buy multiple AE boxes and set up a network using only these.
However, I think you meant to say with respect to the BSD license that it is the "NOT sharing is not theft" license, or more appropriately the "Refusing to share even when you have benefitted directly from others have sharing with you" license if you want to be fair rather than merely interesting.
The thing is, I think that his wording of "sharing is not theft" versus "not sharing is theft" was deliberate.
Only one word is different between these, and that word is moved, not altered. I think he was trying to highlight the similarities between the philosophies between these two licenses when it comes to Open-Source. The differences in wording are significant, but the ideological difference is actually quite subtle, and I think that is the point he's trying to get across by using the most similar possible wording.
It also seems to neatly sum up what goes through the minds of people who choose one license over the other. A person who chooses the BSD license wants to share his code, while a person who chooses the GPL wants to ensure that his code is shared. In that light, he's being quite fair.
Judging a format on the base of its file size is stupid, to put it mildly. You can always save your files as SVGZ (gzipped SVG) and get nice small binary files. Inkscape supports reading and writing SVGZ transparently.
But see, that's an informed decision. People like the person you're replying to have this delusion that in order for anything to work well it must be totally self-contained, i.e. reinventing the wheel at every opportunity.
No, really, that's it. "There are risks, so we shouldn't do it". That sums up the entire argument. He equates all nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. I also find it rather amusing that he assumes that the only use for oil is in fuel; this is not true. It would take a lot more than "green energy" to allow us to "leave the oil and coal in the ground"; we would have to completely break our current dependence on polymers as we know them.
There's plenty of propaganda on the other side, too, don't get me wrong. But I find it amusing to find people who consider nuclear energy "too dangerous" yet push for plenty of other equally-dangerous technologies. Let's have some rationality here, please.
The myth that the 3 Gs and PPLQ make a game a commercial success is perpetuated by the mistaken notion that all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys.
Oh, not all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys. I'm fully aware of that. At the same time, the market of sexually frustrated males (not necessarily teenage) is big enough that if you go for them you're virtually guaranteed great success.
No one wants to aim for the top 5 most commercially successful PC games anymore. They did great, but all five of those games broke wildly out of the norm, and were enormously risky. For every game that successfully broke the mold, a hundred games tried and failed.
Corporations want a formula for success; a way to make money with very little risk. PPLQ is a working formula in the gaming industry, just like "bubblegum pop" in the music business is a working formula. And for those of us to whom the formula doesn't appeal, well, it just sucks to be us then, because our market is deemed too risky.
This is the formula used (depressingly successfully) by many game companies nowadays. Everything else can be sacrificed by these three.
GUNS: Actually, violence in general. More violence is good, but quality ("realism", meaning extra gore) can make up for a lack of quantity.
GIRLS: The more women and the less clothing, the better. Any kind of implied sexuality is better than nothing, however.
GRAPHICS: Photorealism = good, any other graphics style = bad. This is mostly an extension of Guns and Girls, since "realism" (actually pandering to a perverse fantasy, but your average gamer has a hard time telling the difference) is key to these areas.
These three factors contribute to what is sometimes called PPLQ, "Perceived Penis Length Quotient". The higher the PPLQ, the better the game will sell, because it is perceived as a Manly Game. Nintendo's problems as of late stem mostly from the fact that it refuses to satisfy PPLQ, under the deluded impression that innovation and gameplay are actually important to the average modern gamer. Thus, we get games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, games doomed before they ever hit shelves because they were not deemed Manly enough.
Um... Forgive me if I have some reservations about that. Check out Tracy Hickman's The Immortals; I really hope these guys do better testing than the people from this book (who practically wiped out humanity -in spirit, if not literally- with a virus what was to have been the cure for AIDS).
Slashdot Mirror
I hadn't thought of that, actually. I was talking about the distro's name, "Hikarunix". It's a reference to the anime Hikaru no Go. The title character is taught to play Go by Sai, the restless spirit of an ancient Go master.
Is the window manager called Sai?
Camino has had tabbed browsing for a long time.
What he was talking about is the "tab" paradigm used by OmniWeb 5.0. This paradigm doesn't actually use tabs at all; rather, it's a drawer filled with thumbnails of the sites on it. You can typically fit four or five thumbnails into the drawer before needing to scroll.
Very pretty, but not nearly as useful in the real world; the thumbnails add less than you'd think and there's even less room for sites in the drawer than there is on a toolbar. I'm glad that Camino went with actual tabs.
Two-factor is indeed based on something you have and something you know. But "something you know" isn't your username; that's "something you are". "Something you know" is, in fact, your password.
Two-factor authentication actually has three factors. The username part is so insecure, however, that no one really counts it, because everyone has to know it in order to do any business with you at all. Many graphical login managers even present a list of usernames, because keeping these secret hampers the system's usability -no one knows who anyone is- for no real security gain.
The user-memorized password is not "an artifact of an older system"; it is still an important part of security, It is no longer the only important part of the security process, but it retains its importance.
All media is biased, one way or another. The only differences are in direction and how honest the media outlets are about their biases.
This said, the best thing to do is try and research the same subject from multiple sources with as diverse a set of biases as possible. The truth will be somewhere in the middle of the biases you find.
Are these censored, or were they simply not picked up the outlets which the writers had wanted so desperately to appear in?
There is a huge difference. I read several of the aforementioned articles during their original runs. No laws were passed banning them, and the US government never made any attempt to stop their runs. Therefore, no censorship.
True censorship exists in this world. It seems to me, however, that this list is nothing more than a couple of authors whining about their stories not running as widely as they had wanted.
Should it not be possible to include bibliographies in entries? The entire Wiki might not be deemed authoritative in this way, but an entry with a decent bibliography might be considered valid on its own.
Of course, I'm not sure anyone has tried doing bibliographies in Wiki markup before; it may take some extension to the standard. Still, I don't think it would be a bad idea.
Has a collision been found yet concerning data which has both the same MD5 sum and the same SHA-1 sum?
It would seem as though even if SHA-1 were to fail, the two algorithms used together could bolster each other security-wise. This slows things down, of course, but would it not suffice for the time being?
Hmm. I hadn't heard anything about SCO hiring Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf as its PR guy.
The lawyers do ask, but they don't have to. It's a matter of courtesy more than anything else.
There's at least one instance, "Amish Paradise", where the original artist (Coolio) denied permission and Weird Al went ahead with it anyway. As it turns out, several Amish communities were also horribly offended by the song, but it's against their beliefs to sue him, so they haven't done anything about it.
If AOL laid off all the Netscape engineers, then who made this release?
Selling off the profitable divisions to concentrate on the money-losing portion? What business-management professor taught them that trick, and why does this professor still have a job?
Free speech doesn't allow you to run protection rackets, so why this? It's the same thing, if you think about it: sending popups with a promise to stop if you're paid. The only differences are in degree and scale.
Not that this is going to do anything to prevent people from sending backdoor popups; nothing ever does. However, it does allow people to drop the hammer on those who continue this practice.
Actually, the PNG folks do have an animation standard: MNG. In fact, it's in many ways superior, because it can support lossless or lossy compression (JNG).
Unfortunately, by making it an optional part of the standard, they ensured that browsers wouldn't support it. Even Mozilla doesn't support it anymore.
You'll notice that cities which are fairly close together do have integrated rail systems. But the US as a whole is simply too large and too sparsely populated for rail to work well on a national scale.
Rail's not terribly flexible: you can only go where there is a line, and the lines themselves are expensive to run. This is not a problem for relatively densely-populated areas, because you're guaranteed of having enough people everywhere that running that many rails is viable. In sparsely-populated areas, however, there's simply no viable way to run rails everywhere that people go, because there aren't enough people going everywhere to support all those lines. If they don't go everywhere, then people won't use them.
I'm not so sure about that. The whole point of checks and balances is that each branch has some powers over the other two, but the other branches have powers over it as well.
Let's take the Supreme Court, for example. You're probably referring to the power of judicial review: the ability to declare laws unconstitutional (this was actually never codified in the Constitution; it's an important legal tradition and perhaps ought to be codfied, but it is not). This is, in fact, a very important power. However, it is not unbalanced:
1) Congress can override SCOTUS decisions. It takes a Constitutional amendment to do so (making the law constitutional by changing the Constitution to suit), and so it is very difficult, but it can be done.
2) The executive branch appoints justices. It's a little-known fact that even SCOTUS justices can be impeached and removed from office, even though they otherwise hold life terms; this has never been done, but it is possible.
3) The SCOTUS cannot act of its own volition; it must be called upon before it can do anything. The Executive and legislative branches have limited power, but they can use (most of) those powers at will; the SCOTUS is powerless unless actually called on by one of the other branches, or by the people.
This is the whole point of checks and balances: no one branch is self-policing, no one branch has unlimited power, and most of the actions of one branch can be undone (though not easily) by at least one of the other branches. The idea is to fight corruption on two fronts: one, by reducing its ability to form, and two, limiting its ability to do damage even when it does form. It's actually a pretty well-designed system, at least on that score.
The exact same situation occurred in Firefox 0.9, which also failed to handle it gracefully. Frankly, it's things like this which make me wonder (with great fear) that the Mozilla team's commitment to the Mac may be faltering. These fixes would have been borderline-trivial to implement, at least in the settings import wizard if not automatically.
I may be daft, but I still don't get it. If it acts as a access point, then how does it get internet/LAN connectivity without either an Ethernet (wired) connection (so why bother?) or by wirelessly repeating an AEBS connection. How else can you do this?
Two possibilities here.
One, it has an Ethernet port, which -although it could go into an iBook- could also go into a switch, or a broadband device (DSL/Cable/whatever), or possibly even another machine.
Two, if the house doesn't have an Internet connection -unlikely, but possible- then it needs no Internet access anyway.
Three, I find it unlikely that the device can't be configured to bridge other networks. It's entirely possible that it cannot be automatically configured to do so -I'd bet that Apple's solution to this problem depends on Rendezvous- but since we know that it has a remote configuration interface for both Mac and Windows (and someone released a Java configuration util for the original AirPort, so presumably this could be done again), it has to be configurable by some means.
Well that's all nice and well -- but do you already have an Apple base station? If not, expect to spend up big getting your "Wifi extender". According to the specs posted -- "AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network. " -- translation - if you want to use this for wireless iTunes streaming, then you will need to also have purchased an Apple airport in order to NOT to have to run an Ethernet cable to the Airport Express.
Um, no. Read the specs more closely next time.
If you are using AE as a range-extender, then yes, it does require an AEBS. However, it can also act as its own base station/access point/whatever, with the caveat that it only supports up to ten devices (the AEBS supports up to 50).
Of course, from the look of things, you can also buy multiple AE boxes and set up a network using only these.
However, I think you meant to say with respect to the BSD license that it is the "NOT sharing is not theft" license, or more appropriately the "Refusing to share even when you have benefitted directly from others have sharing with you" license if you want to be fair rather than merely interesting.
The thing is, I think that his wording of "sharing is not theft" versus "not sharing is theft" was deliberate.
Only one word is different between these, and that word is moved, not altered. I think he was trying to highlight the similarities between the philosophies between these two licenses when it comes to Open-Source. The differences in wording are significant, but the ideological difference is actually quite subtle, and I think that is the point he's trying to get across by using the most similar possible wording.
It also seems to neatly sum up what goes through the minds of people who choose one license over the other. A person who chooses the BSD license wants to share his code, while a person who chooses the GPL wants to ensure that his code is shared. In that light, he's being quite fair.
Judging a format on the base of its file size is stupid, to put it mildly. You can always save your files as SVGZ (gzipped SVG) and get nice small binary files. Inkscape supports reading and writing SVGZ transparently.
But see, that's an informed decision. People like the person you're replying to have this delusion that in order for anything to work well it must be totally self-contained, i.e. reinventing the wheel at every opportunity.
"Um, nukes are bad, mmmkay?"
No, really, that's it. "There are risks, so we shouldn't do it". That sums up the entire argument. He equates all nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. I also find it rather amusing that he assumes that the only use for oil is in fuel; this is not true. It would take a lot more than "green energy" to allow us to "leave the oil and coal in the ground"; we would have to completely break our current dependence on polymers as we know them.
There's plenty of propaganda on the other side, too, don't get me wrong. But I find it amusing to find people who consider nuclear energy "too dangerous" yet push for plenty of other equally-dangerous technologies. Let's have some rationality here, please.
The myth that the 3 Gs and PPLQ make a game a commercial success is perpetuated by the mistaken notion that all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys.
Oh, not all gamers are sexually frustrated teenage boys. I'm fully aware of that. At the same time, the market of sexually frustrated males (not necessarily teenage) is big enough that if you go for them you're virtually guaranteed great success.
No one wants to aim for the top 5 most commercially successful PC games anymore. They did great, but all five of those games broke wildly out of the norm, and were enormously risky. For every game that successfully broke the mold, a hundred games tried and failed.
Corporations want a formula for success; a way to make money with very little risk. PPLQ is a working formula in the gaming industry, just like "bubblegum pop" in the music business is a working formula. And for those of us to whom the formula doesn't appeal, well, it just sucks to be us then, because our market is deemed too risky.
...Guns, Girls, and Graphics.
This is the formula used (depressingly successfully) by many game companies nowadays. Everything else can be sacrificed by these three.
GUNS: Actually, violence in general. More violence is good, but quality ("realism", meaning extra gore) can make up for a lack of quantity.
GIRLS: The more women and the less clothing, the better. Any kind of implied sexuality is better than nothing, however.
GRAPHICS: Photorealism = good, any other graphics style = bad. This is mostly an extension of Guns and Girls, since "realism" (actually pandering to a perverse fantasy, but your average gamer has a hard time telling the difference) is key to these areas.
These three factors contribute to what is sometimes called PPLQ, "Perceived Penis Length Quotient". The higher the PPLQ, the better the game will sell, because it is perceived as a Manly Game. Nintendo's problems as of late stem mostly from the fact that it refuses to satisfy PPLQ, under the deluded impression that innovation and gameplay are actually important to the average modern gamer. Thus, we get games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, games doomed before they ever hit shelves because they were not deemed Manly enough.
Um... Forgive me if I have some reservations about that. Check out Tracy Hickman's The Immortals; I really hope these guys do better testing than the people from this book (who practically wiped out humanity -in spirit, if not literally- with a virus what was to have been the cure for AIDS).