228 years ago, the Continental Congress turned the tables on the government, harnessing it in service of the people, relegating its rights to its natural inferiority to people. Rather than ban the government, they created the most stable and productive government structure since then, possibly ever. We the people allowed the creation of the synthetic "person", the corporation, by ignoring the legal deceptions at its creation in California in the late 1800s, and feeding its growth through the 20th Century for its benefit to those who administer power in our country. [...]
This is so almost eloquent, and yet, almost entirely unintelligible.
The big secret of society is that we are still strong and powerful, capable of living the lives we want, and doing whatever we want within the limits of kindness and benevolence.
Douglas Adams wrote that somewhere in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
As far as strange lives are concerned, my friend's uncle is truly the most incredible man who ever lived.
One of my favorite stories is about the time him and his buddies went dune-skiing with the uncle pulling the other guy with his motorcycle. The uncle looks over his shoulder to see how buddy's doing and BAM, right over a road. Six months in a body cast for the skiier.
The very first day he gets out of the cast, they do it again, with the same damn result.
On another occasion, he got fired from his job for throwing his dinner at the president of the company he worked for at a fancy dinner and screaming something obscene at him. He got a two hundred thousand dollar golden handshake, only to be rehired when the company was bought out two months later.
So many stories... My friend's father and the aforementioned uncle in their youth managed to get ALL Canadians permanently banned from a campground somewhere in Wisconsin. Every year they'd go back, check in wearing disguises, and then toilet paper the place.
Sometimes I think that the true measure of the value of a person's life is how many insane experiences they can attribute to themselves.
The trap I see many "unusually bright" people fall into is that because everything came easily to them in High School, they never learned to really work at things.
Slacked through high-school myself, and was very surprised when taking six cross-faculty classes in first year that I failed Calculus.
Earth to Student, being smart does not mean you are exempt from working!
The past three years (I am now coming up on my fourth of five or six) have taught me a hell of a lot about how to work. Any idiot can be born smart, but actually using those smarts... now that's intelligent.
As for general college advice, I recommend you take diverse classes. Many universities will force you to take classes outside your faculty. Approach this task with verve and enthusiasm. I have always found semesters where I had some elective outside CS/Math were much easier on my brain.
Also, I realised I could choose to enjoy my classes or to hate them. It may be the spirit of the day to bitch about how terrible school is, but you can learn as much or as little as you want (without really affecting your GPA.) Why bother if you don't want to be there?
Perhaps there will always be weaknesses in theories to explain weaknesses in older ones, ad infinitum.
Reference: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
And, to quote Doug Adams: "There is a theory that states once we figure out exactly why we are here, that the universe will cease to exist and be replaced by something even more complex and confusing.
There is another theory that states this has already happened." -pvh
When Perl went from 5.6 -> 5.8 in Debian unstable, it just about killed me.
All of a sudden ANYTHING that relied on Perl for ANY reason lost its dependancies!
It was awful. Almost nothing would install without hacking and working around, and I was (relatively) new to Debian at the time. When I asked around for help, I was told "Well, you shouldn't have switched to unstable, N00B."
Well, fuck you too, here I am, stuck. Telling someone who fell down a well "don't play near the well" doesn't help anyone.
The moral of the story? Stay away from Debian unstable until you know your way around the Debian package system really well.
On the other hand, if you don't ever use Debian unstable, you probably won't ever have any motivation to learn it.
The other moral? The vocal minority are the bandwidth majority.
Recently, the Rockbox Open Source firmware replacement added voice support.
Considering that the rockbox firmware (which completely replaces the original (crappy) firmware) is free, multi-lingual, and has optionally enlarged fonts, I'd say go get one!
The Jukebox itself has a battery life of around 10 hours, and comes in 10-20GB versions, last I checked. Archos has recently been phasing these ones out of production, so you can find them cheap here and there, and off ebay.
This news post really does nothing to explain why Subversion is so much better than CVS.
Subversion is, in essence, a reimplementation of CVS without the limitations of CVS.
It has basically the same functionality as CVS, but is based on a BerkeleyDB backend instead of a simple filesystem approach like CVS. This means, among many other things, that you can move files from directory to directory and rename them without orphaning them.
This is, IMHO, reason enough to switch. (And was reason enough to switch for me a while ago.)
SVN can do binary-file diffs, tracks submissions of multiple files as part of the same revision, and if memory serves me correctly, does O(1) branching and tagging.
For those of you who, like me, use TortoiseCVS to do version control in windows, there is TortoiseSVN which works like a charm and provides all the functionality you're using in TortoiseCVS with some nice extras.
I could go on at great length, but the Subversion team can probably do a much better job explaining this than I can, so go to their web site instead.
Quite honestly, I think that Subversion is so much superior to CVS that it will completely replace it, and I haven't got anything to do with the project. Once I switched over, I never looked back.
1.0 release means that SVN now supports everything that CVS does, with a few extras. From here, they are planning to work on new features.
I've heard some bellyaching over the license already (boo hoo). BSD code is Gratis and Libre, and if the Subversion team isn't losing sleep over MicroSomeone ha>oring their project into one of their own, I won't either.
Please don't turn this discussion into another license vs. license argument, and have a look at the project for its real merit.
But the real question to you is. Did you pay for opera? Did you make a donation to Apache and all the other OSS software you are using? In short did you fully pay for all software you ever used? No then shut the fuck up. You steal we steal. If you did, then give yourselve a pat on the back, there will no doubt be a place for you in heaven, with just a little bit of hell for infringing on acdsee's trademark.:P
I thought the whole idea behind software being Free was that payment was optional, and that no one should be coerced, guilt tripped, or insulted into paying for something they either don't want to, or can't afford.
If you choose to support Apache, good for you. You're doing good work.
Kindly remember that theft is not piracy (piracy is copyright infringement), and that using software which is freely given away is not even piracy.
Actually, I'm an SVG nerd and web designer, and I use IE because it feels weird to use Netscape or Opera. Things don't render the same way. They don't interact the same way. Flame me for that if you will, but considering how much time I spend in a web browser in the average day, it's a real problem for me.
I would describe the feeling as being akin to either a Canadian or an American swapping countries. Things are the same... but not... I always wonder how Americans get by without French on their cereal boxes...
Netscape/Mozilla (Canada) may be better, but most people live in the United States of Microsoft.
-pvh (Sorry about the antiAmerican barbs, it's all meant in good humour, eh?)
There is a very good reason not to use Flash, and it is very simple.
SVG is not Flash, and it doesn't do the same kinds of jobs. Oh, sure, anything you want to do in Flash could be accomplished in SVG, but if you want to do piddly kiddy animations and such, you're probably better off using.SWFs.
SVG, on the other hand, is XML based, which means you can do data driven graphics with it in a snap. Hook a little XSLT to an XML exporting database and you have a reusable, generic graphing tool which can be deployed on a web page and doesn't require spawning processes left right and centre.
The spec is Open (as well as merely open), is text based (unlike.SWF so you can manipulate the source in all kinds of ways), and is living (the W3C team will actually listen and respond to your suggestions).
Microsoft's Visio team has implemented support for it, Corel has recently released a more designer oriented tool (Smart Graphics Studio), and Adobe has been pushing SVG quietly for ages now.
In conclusion, SVG is not Flash. It isn't competing with Flash, and when you see an SVG document with HTML, movies, and yes, even Flash embedded in it (you can do two of the three so far) then you'll begin to understand the power and flexibility of SVG for real day to day use.
One need only look as far back as 1979 (Vietnam) or 1962 (India) for examples of overt Chinese aggression, which has it's roots in the somewhat questionable policies of "active defense" introduced largely by Chairman Mao in the thirties.
So that's where GWB learned how to conduct foreign policy! "Somewhat questionable" my ass!
My memory is a bit sketchy in places, but I am sure y'all will fill in the blanks with/.'s usual enthusiasm.
So we begin.
A few internet cowboys, seeing the demise of Napster, cobble together Kazaa -- a decentralized filesharing network.
Originally, the software was licensed for distribution under three names, Kazaa, Morpheus, and Grokster, each of which was essentially the same program, with a different skin.
Kazaa was known for making an attempt at placating the record industry by only allowing lower bit-rate songs to be downloaded, whereas Morpheus had no such restrictions.
Forgive my lack of knowledge about Grokster -- the programs were all so close to identical that I never tried it.
Now, Kazaa came under legal fire in the Netherlands, but didn't get an official shut down.
Fearing their investments (and possibly their freedom), the original owners of Kazaa sold Kazaa to Sharmin Networks, who are perhaps the dodgiest software company I've ever seen.
Sharmin is also infamous for their spyware, and Bonzi Buddy. I can't remember who the founder was -- and Sharman Network's web page has mysteriously disappeared, but they were involved in some great scandal in Australia, and even a cursory Slashdot search (of the kind I'm unwilling to do on a saturday morning) will turn up the details, undoubtedly.
Sharmin was the one who loaded up Kazaa with enough spyware to make Back Orifice look like a legitimate client application, and has a EULA including a clause giving Sharmin permission to use your clock cycles, bandwidth, and hard drive space however they want.
This was part of what is known now as AltNet, Sharmin's answer to the Seti@Home project, or ud.com's Cancer curing project. Turn Kazaa users into a giant super computer... And then sell the time to the highest bidder.
Only one problem -- Kazaa's reputation was so bad, everyone was using Morpheus, who's tagline was something along the lines of "File-sharing without spyware".
Kazaa responded by ejecting Morpheus from their network by poisoning all the Kazaa hosts that upgraded to the new version. Any Morpheus client that touched an infected node was killed -- Kazaa overwrote a part of your registry to ensure you would never be able to use Morpheus again.
Around that time, they put up a button on the front of their site offering amnesty for refugees in this file-sharing client war, and Morpheus released Lime-Wire as Morpheus 2.0b.
Basically, the new morpheus was an old fork of the limewire code with an M for a logo, and was just a klunky gnutella client. There was some hullaballoo about open source this, and no source code that, and then Morpheus released the code again. Checking their web page now, they claim to have a final 2.0 out, but I haven't used it and cannot vouch for its quality.
Since then, Sharman Networks has been keeping a fairly low profile, and a hacker named Yuri has started releasing KazaaLite. KazaaLite is not a stripped down version of the software, so much as a stripped down version of the installer.
One without Bonzi Buddies, or yellow link underliners (remember that little ad-fad?) or any of the other myriad hacks and stupidities which Kazaa inflicts on your system.
KazaaLite does actually include a few patches to the executable, mostly to ensure Kazaa can't monitor your usage or install spyware on your system, and new versions are released with some regularity.
Well. Now we're up to the current date, with somewhat foggy bits along the way, and probably a few confused details by myself. I would appreciate any clarifications or corrections, as this all came from memory.
Sure, you'll probably have to sell a kidney to buy the extra two monitors and not *every* game supports it, but the few that do would make it more than worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Available? Why would I want my girl to be available? Frankly, I'm happy to have the other four attributes.
I guess that makes me one of the exceptions, or at least one of the boyfriends of the exceptions.
"If I had to tell you to stay away from my girl, she wouldn't be my girl... Oh, and Logan? Stay away from my girl."
228 years ago, the Continental Congress turned the tables on the government, harnessing it in service of the people, relegating its rights to its natural inferiority to people. Rather than ban the government, they created the most stable and productive government structure since then, possibly ever. We the people allowed the creation of the synthetic "person", the corporation, by ignoring the legal deceptions at its creation in California in the late 1800s, and feeding its growth through the 20th Century for its benefit to those who administer power in our country. [...]
This is so almost eloquent, and yet, almost entirely unintelligible.
Hey! It DOES have those fifties tailfins! Man, I totally dig classic, er, bombs.
"Milk Experiment" was a trick by one of William Gibson's characters in Virtual Light, one of the Bridge Trilogy.
I believe it was Chevette Washington, the girl who found the glasses, that came up with the idea, but please correct me if you remember otherwise.
The big secret of society is that we are still strong and powerful, capable of living the lives we want, and doing whatever we want within the limits of kindness and benevolence.
I'm tired of hearing sad-sap arguments otherwise.
http://unamerican.com
Douglas Adams wrote that somewhere in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
As far as strange lives are concerned, my friend's uncle is truly the most incredible man who ever lived.
One of my favorite stories is about the time him and his buddies went dune-skiing with the uncle pulling the other guy with his motorcycle. The uncle looks over his shoulder to see how buddy's doing and BAM, right over a road. Six months in a body cast for the skiier.
The very first day he gets out of the cast, they do it again, with the same damn result.
On another occasion, he got fired from his job for throwing his dinner at the president of the company he worked for at a fancy dinner and screaming something obscene at him. He got a two hundred thousand dollar golden handshake, only to be rehired when the company was bought out two months later.
So many stories... My friend's father and the aforementioned uncle in their youth managed to get ALL Canadians permanently banned from a campground somewhere in Wisconsin. Every year they'd go back, check in wearing disguises, and then toilet paper the place.
Sometimes I think that the true measure of the value of a person's life is how many insane experiences they can attribute to themselves.
Rumsfeld's commentary on the Executive Summary:
There more you know you don't know, the more you realise there are known unknowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
The trap I see many "unusually bright" people fall into is that because everything came easily to them in High School, they never learned to really work at things.
Slacked through high-school myself, and was very surprised when taking six cross-faculty classes in first year that I failed Calculus.
Earth to Student, being smart does not mean you are exempt from working!
The past three years (I am now coming up on my fourth of five or six) have taught me a hell of a lot about how to work. Any idiot can be born smart, but actually using those smarts... now that's intelligent.
As for general college advice, I recommend you take diverse classes. Many universities will force you to take classes outside your faculty. Approach this task with verve and enthusiasm. I have always found semesters where I had some elective outside CS/Math were much easier on my brain.
Also, I realised I could choose to enjoy my classes or to hate them. It may be the spirit of the day to bitch about how terrible school is, but you can learn as much or as little as you want (without really affecting your GPA.) Why bother if you don't want to be there?
There are a couple problems with this if you are a *nix user...
The use of *NIX has been classified as copyright protection circumvention.
Please bend over, grab your ankles, and wait for the Gesta^H^H^H^H^HRIAA to arrive.
Perhaps there will always be weaknesses in theories to explain weaknesses in older ones, ad infinitum.
Reference: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.
And, to quote Doug Adams:
"There is a theory that states once we figure out exactly why we are here, that the universe will cease to exist and be replaced by something even more complex and confusing.
There is another theory that states this has already happened."
-pvh
> About halfway through the song, there's an ad for Pepsi ... followed by the rest of the song.
I thought the latest hit from Britney Spears _was_ an ad for Pepsi?
Maybe if I'd had the volume on I'd be able to say one way or the other...
When Perl went from 5.6 -> 5.8 in Debian unstable, it just about killed me.
All of a sudden ANYTHING that relied on Perl for ANY reason lost its dependancies!
It was awful. Almost nothing would install without hacking and working around, and I was (relatively) new to Debian at the time. When I asked around for help, I was told "Well, you shouldn't have switched to unstable, N00B."
Well, fuck you too, here I am, stuck. Telling someone who fell down a well "don't play near the well" doesn't help anyone.
The moral of the story? Stay away from Debian unstable until you know your way around the Debian package system really well.
On the other hand, if you don't ever use Debian unstable, you probably won't ever have any motivation to learn it.
The other moral? The vocal minority are the bandwidth majority.
Recently, the Rockbox Open Source firmware replacement added voice support.
Considering that the rockbox firmware (which completely replaces the original (crappy) firmware) is free, multi-lingual, and has optionally enlarged fonts, I'd say go get one!
The Jukebox itself has a battery life of around 10 hours, and comes in 10-20GB versions, last I checked. Archos has recently been phasing these ones out of production, so you can find them cheap here and there, and off ebay.
Requisite reading:
Rockbox!
Archos
It also works with the Neo MP3 player which I don't have a handy link for.
This news post really does nothing to explain why Subversion is so much better than CVS.
Subversion is, in essence, a reimplementation of CVS without the limitations of CVS.
It has basically the same functionality as CVS, but is based on a BerkeleyDB backend instead of a simple filesystem approach like CVS. This means, among many other things, that you can move files from directory to directory and rename them without orphaning them.
This is, IMHO, reason enough to switch. (And was reason enough to switch for me a while ago.)
SVN can do binary-file diffs, tracks submissions of multiple files as part of the same revision, and if memory serves me correctly, does O(1) branching and tagging.
For those of you who, like me, use TortoiseCVS to do version control in windows, there is TortoiseSVN which works like a charm and provides all the functionality you're using in TortoiseCVS with some nice extras.
I could go on at great length, but the Subversion team can probably do a much better job explaining this than I can, so go to their web site instead.
Quite honestly, I think that Subversion is so much superior to CVS that it will completely replace it, and I haven't got anything to do with the project. Once I switched over, I never looked back.
1.0 release means that SVN now supports everything that CVS does, with a few extras. From here, they are planning to work on new features.
I've heard some bellyaching over the license already (boo hoo). BSD code is Gratis and Libre, and if the Subversion team isn't losing sleep over MicroSomeone ha>oring their project into one of their own, I won't either.
Please don't turn this discussion into another license vs. license argument, and have a look at the project for its real merit.
Are you slow, son?
You think Risk was first?
Oh man... If I wasn't too busy playing El Grande, I'll tell you all about how wrong you are.
Here, start at the 'geek.
BoardGameGeek
Built In Operating System
(thanks, OtherNeal.)
If you choose to support Apache, good for you. You're doing good work.
Kindly remember that theft is not piracy (piracy is copyright infringement), and that using software which is freely given away is not even piracy.
Cheers.
Simulators for the rest of us...
WRONG:
SVG implements SMIL animations, as well as having a well defined DOM interface.
SVG could do what Flash does -- if you wanted to.
But SVG isn't Flash. You were right for the wrong reasons. SVG is so much more than Flash, it just doesn't have the history behind it yet.
-pvh
Actually, I'm an SVG nerd and web designer, and I use IE because it feels weird to use Netscape or Opera. Things don't render the same way. They don't interact the same way. Flame me for that if you will, but considering how much time I spend in a web browser in the average day, it's a real problem for me.
I would describe the feeling as being akin to either a Canadian or an American swapping countries. Things are the same... but not... I always wonder how Americans get by without French on their cereal boxes...
Netscape/Mozilla (Canada) may be better, but most people live in the United States of Microsoft.
-pvh
(Sorry about the antiAmerican barbs, it's all meant in good humour, eh?)
There is a very good reason not to use Flash, and it is very simple.
.SWFs.
.SWF so you can manipulate the source in all kinds of ways), and is living (the W3C team will actually listen and respond to your suggestions).
SVG is not Flash, and it doesn't do the same kinds of jobs. Oh, sure, anything you want to do in Flash could be accomplished in SVG, but if you want to do piddly kiddy animations and such, you're probably better off using
SVG, on the other hand, is XML based, which means you can do data driven graphics with it in a snap. Hook a little XSLT to an XML exporting database and you have a reusable, generic graphing tool which can be deployed on a web page and doesn't require spawning processes left right and centre.
The spec is Open (as well as merely open), is text based (unlike
Microsoft's Visio team has implemented support for it, Corel has recently released a more designer oriented tool (Smart Graphics Studio), and Adobe has been pushing SVG quietly for ages now.
In conclusion, SVG is not Flash. It isn't competing with Flash, and when you see an SVG document with HTML, movies, and yes, even Flash embedded in it (you can do two of the three so far) then you'll begin to understand the power and flexibility of SVG for real day to day use.
Cheers,
-pvh
Institute of Ocean Sciences
So that's where GWB learned how to conduct foreign policy! "Somewhat questionable" my ass!
Frankly, I'm astounded that you could recognize that as a joke.
My memory is a bit sketchy in places, but I am sure y'all will fill in the blanks with /.'s usual enthusiasm.
So we begin.
A few internet cowboys, seeing the demise of Napster, cobble together Kazaa -- a decentralized filesharing network.
Originally, the software was licensed for distribution under three names, Kazaa, Morpheus, and Grokster, each of which was essentially the same program, with a different skin.
Kazaa was known for making an attempt at placating the record industry by only allowing lower bit-rate songs to be downloaded, whereas Morpheus had no such restrictions.
Forgive my lack of knowledge about Grokster -- the programs were all so close to identical that I never tried it.
Now, Kazaa came under legal fire in the Netherlands, but didn't get an official shut down.
Fearing their investments (and possibly their freedom), the original owners of Kazaa sold Kazaa to Sharmin Networks, who are perhaps the dodgiest software company I've ever seen.
Sharmin is also infamous for their spyware, and Bonzi Buddy. I can't remember who the founder was -- and Sharman Network's web page has mysteriously disappeared, but they were involved in some great scandal in Australia, and even a cursory Slashdot search (of the kind I'm unwilling to do on a saturday morning) will turn up the details, undoubtedly.
Sharmin was the one who loaded up Kazaa with enough spyware to make Back Orifice look like a legitimate client application, and has a EULA including a clause giving Sharmin permission to use your clock cycles, bandwidth, and hard drive space however they want.
This was part of what is known now as AltNet, Sharmin's answer to the Seti@Home project, or ud.com's Cancer curing project. Turn Kazaa users into a giant super computer... And then sell the time to the highest bidder.
Only one problem -- Kazaa's reputation was so bad, everyone was using Morpheus, who's tagline was something along the lines of "File-sharing without spyware".
Kazaa responded by ejecting Morpheus from their network by poisoning all the Kazaa hosts that upgraded to the new version. Any Morpheus client that touched an infected node was killed -- Kazaa overwrote a part of your registry to ensure you would never be able to use Morpheus again.
Around that time, they put up a button on the front of their site offering amnesty for refugees in this file-sharing client war, and Morpheus released Lime-Wire as Morpheus 2.0b.
Basically, the new morpheus was an old fork of the limewire code with an M for a logo, and was just a klunky gnutella client. There was some hullaballoo about open source this, and no source code that, and then Morpheus released the code again. Checking their web page now, they claim to have a final 2.0 out, but I haven't used it and cannot vouch for its quality.
Since then, Sharman Networks has been keeping a fairly low profile, and a hacker named Yuri has started releasing KazaaLite. KazaaLite is not a stripped down version of the software, so much as a stripped down version of the installer.
One without Bonzi Buddies, or yellow link underliners (remember that little ad-fad?) or any of the other myriad hacks and stupidities which Kazaa inflicts on your system.
KazaaLite does actually include a few patches to the executable, mostly to ensure Kazaa can't monitor your usage or install spyware on your system, and new versions are released with some regularity.
Well. Now we're up to the current date, with somewhat foggy bits along the way, and probably a few confused details by myself. I would appreciate any clarifications or corrections, as this all came from memory.
Cheers, and remember: KazaaLite is the answer.
Matrox Parhelia.h elia512/tec hnology/triplehead.cfm
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/par
Sure, you'll probably have to sell a kidney to buy the extra two monitors and not *every* game supports it, but the few that do would make it more than worth it.
-pvh