Agreed 100%. The problem is that this is China we are talking about. A few years back here on Slashdot I likened the.cn ccTLD to a sewer due to the rampant abuse by spammers, port scans other attacks coming from their IP space and so on. The response from many admins was to blackhole the.cn domain and China's IP space en masse, something I predicted would come back to haunt them as more and more Chinese business tried to establish ties with the West and were unable to connect. I guess the Chinese government must have finally realised that too, because they have just implemented a completely draconian set of restrictions to.cn domain registrations that have seen several resellers stop selling sub-domains in.cn altogether.
Give it a couple of years and I suspect that we'll probably see a similar crackdown happen with the publishing of scientific papers in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Chinese science from whichever gutter it's languishing in by then. Chances are it will be just as draconian as with the.cn domain registrations, and equally likely that it will be far too late for at least some of the scientic journals that got their fingers burnt in the mean time.
Don't worry. The Content Aware fill in the Extended version of Photoshop is more than up to that particular challenge - check out the demo! [YouTube video link for those at work]
Cool. I have a strategy that might work, but it involves getting the first piece dead centre in the bottom such that it creates a level "base", then building a platform up from that on which you can actually complete rows, albeit on a reduced height playing field. The pre-requistite is that the first piece is suitable for creating the platform which, depending on whether the screen width is an odd or even number of boxes across, is a different subset of the available pieces. If you get a "Z" or "S" piece to start though, I think it's pretty much game over, no matter what you do.
It depends what counts as a "Linux" install too. Linux isn't just the downloadable distros that you can install yourself; it includes all the Linux based devices like netbooks and countless other types of appliances that use highly customised versions of it. If you include the whole cornucopia of systems that use a Linux kernel at their core then I suspect that the most popular Linux "distro" might well turn out to be something completely unexpected and off the wall. As an example I've seen repeated claims (not sure whether they are correct or not though) that the most widely deployed CPU architecture and OS in the world are not actually x86 and Windows but ARM and RTOS respectively, precisely because of the vast number of embedded OSs lurking in everyday "white box" appliances like DVD players, TV sets, washing machines and so on.
I suspect someone's guesstimate may be off as just about every "most popular distro" statistic I've seen has consistently put Ubuntu ahead of Fedora pretty much since Ubuntu first arrived on the scene, except for brief periods immediately after new Fedora releases. Reconciling a 2:1 advantage for Fedora with that is kind of hard, but not impossible; lots of big corporates and SMEs use Red Hat, so Fedora would be a logical choice for their techies' personal use or installs where paying the Red Hat license fee isn't an option for whatever reason, and chances are they'd only download each release once. I'd guess that I used to run at a 6:1 install:download ratio when I was doing this with Fedora, and the German office did something simmilar with Novell/SuSE, so maybe both numbers are actually in the ballpark.
Either way, these are not too shabby figures for Linux market penetration. I wonder how many of those installs are on the Desktop though?;)
True enough, but nuclear powered Mini Coopers? If anything goes wrong, that's going to take the line "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" to a whole new level of understatement...
Photoshop has had that capability natively (ie, not requiring a plugin) since CS4, this is the ability to select an object in an image - litter on a lawn was the example given in the article - and replace its former location in the image with content derived from the surrounding areas. Basically it's like an intelligent, automated version of the Clone Brush tool on steroids.
The two are closely related, as the smaller the pixel's physical dimensions, the fewer photons it can capture for a given exposure time resulting in a lower S/N ratio. For any given sensor size and technology you need to trade off resolution against ISO performance, so a technology providing an four fold increase in sensitivity would, for instance, let you:
Not even a link to a story yet, but the ticker on the BBC News home page is reporting that Google has announced that it has stopped censoring its search engine in China. Since China has already made her position clear on this eventuality I suppose this must mean that Google believes that it might as well be hanged for a wolf, than a lamb.
I'm nipping out for some popcorn; the next couple of days are going to be really interesting...
Someone else is already a virtual monopoly in China. Baidu is by far and away the most popular search engine in China and even Google is essentially an also ran, while Bing and Yahoo are barely above the level of being statistical noise.
If they are not picking IE at random, then they probably belong in my first group then, albeit with a change of descriptive text as whether the association is "Blue e = Internet" or with the name Microsoft is neither here nor there in context. I don't think that this group is necessarily as large as you might think though, in my experience the kind of person who falls into this set has a considerable overlap with the set of users that only upgrades their OS when they get a new computer.
Personally, I think this whole concept is a stupid idea that's right up there with some of the other brain dead excuses for legislative rulings that have come out of the EC, and won't change the status quo by meaningful amount. Once you've deducted the users who will pick a non-IE browser anyway and those who will pick IE based on either its icon or the name "Microsoft" regardless of its position on the screen, there are not too many users left. I doubt very much that when the next round of browser usage figures come in that there is going to be a significant shift towards non-IE browsers that could be attributed to the introduction of the Browser Selection Screen.
Frankly, I have no problem with this result. Quite the opposite in fact, since I think you can probably group the users into three sets, only one of which really matters in connection with the Browser Selection Screen:
Those that equate "Internet" with a blue "e" and as such will pick IE regardless of its position
Those that prefer another browser to IE and will pick another option regardless of positioning
Those that have no clue about browsers and pick essentially at random, or belong to one of the above groups and click in error.
The only people where the selection and any possible bias inherent in the implementation of the random() function are the last group, which is also quite possibly the smallest of the three sets. In an ideal world, you are going to get a bellcurve with the optimum position being in the middle and the least favourable at the sides, so if Microsoft wants to implement random() so that IE is more likely to end up in the position that is joint least likely to be picked of the big five browsers, that's fine by me.
It's also apparently fine for Google's Chrome as well, so if you are anywhere near Ballmer's office in the next few days then I'd keep an eye out for any flying chairs, just in case...
Yeah, but if you actually remember the Sixties then you weren't there, man! Plus, you've got to figure that the double whammy of Alzheimer's and Senile Dementia is starting to creep up on Gen-X as well by now. All in all, I think it's quite understandable that they might have forgotten whether or not they even inhaled, let alone what the shit actually looked like, besides wasn't everything in trippy colours back then, I can't quite remember...
I think that is what Microsoft is implying, without directly pointing a finger and risking a potential law suit.
Chances are that a lot of cells that are only now ending up in laptop batteries have spent quite some time sat on a warehouse shelf somewhere waiting out the financial downturn. Now that there are signs of recovery and people are buying laptops again, the production chain is starting up and those cells are finally going into laptop batteries. However, since the battery as a whole was only assembled last week, say, despite the fact that the component cells were manufactured last year, care to guess which date gets to go on the "Date of manufacture" sticker?
Diatribe or not (no, I didn't bother to read it), I don't think Oracle's is going to be anywhere near the kind of situation Sun ended up in for the foreseeable future. Sun had multiple sources of direct competition across a good deal of their product range and many IT budgets just couldn't justify paying the extra cash for the few extras Sun brought to the equation. Oracle, on the otherhand, has seen off almost all of its competition: DB2, Ingres and Informix are either history or essentially relegated to also-rans in the marketplace for high-end DB servers with paid-for support and an SLA that you could take to court if you had to. It's going to take a screw-up of positively epic proportions for Oracle to go down the pan; "dropping the ball" wouldn't even come close...
You could just delete the certificate yourself. "Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Encryption, View Certificates"[1]. Select the one from CNNIC and hit "Delete".
[1] "Tools, Options, Advanced, Advanced, View Certificates" if you are on Windows, but if you are on Windows the CNNIC certificate is probably not the most significant of your security worries...:)
There seems to be a little confusion over Wacom's product ranges here, but the device most people are probably thinking of is the Cintiq, not one of their more conventional tablets like the Intuos range. They do everything this new screen does and more, as they support all of the pressure and tilt detection routines of the tablets, so the only things that might be novel about this new screen is nature of the QTC technology being used or the cost of its production. Hopefully, the latter; the Cintiqs are a dream to use for retouching, painting or other freehand work, but frighteningly expensive!
Maybe they plan on using a smaller drogue chute to try and get him the right way up first and reduce the speed of descent a little to lessen the strain on the main chute. wouldn't really matter quite so much if that tangles, as long as your design means that you can safely jettison it or otherwise get it out of the way before you deploy the main chute once things have settled down.
Presumably, he's planning on leaping from the balloon when it reaches its maximum altitude for the flight and is about to start it's inevitable descent. At that point his vertical velocity will be pretty near zero and so other than any residual lateral drift coming from the balloon any speed achieved will be entirely due to the influence of gravity. What isn't clear is whether he will be exceeding speed of sound at sea level, or just at his current altitude during the descent as well (it's not possible to do the former without also doing the latter).
Or, as with my case, the firewall on your router only provides one option for rejecting traffic, which is apparently to DROP. If I allow the IPs used by Slashdot through to the IPTables based firewall on my Linux box - which is on a public IP address and is configured to REJECT - then the delay become unnoticeable.
Anyway, since it only adds up to a few dozen syslog entries from Slashdot every few days amoungst the thousands of others coming in from script kiddies and bots I don't particularly care about the scanning so much as about the implementation. It's needlessly borked for everyone out there sitting behind a home router that either defaults to DROP or doesn't provide an option for REJECT, presumably because of the numerous "test your router" and "probe my ports" sites that were around a few years ago that promoted this approach.
Not SMTP; HTTP. The ports scanned are all common default ports for web proxy applications like Squid's:3128, various ":8080" type combinations and such like. I'd have to go digging through my logs to get the complete list, but I'd guess there are about a dozen ports checked in total.
What's so irksome about it is that it's a straight SYN scan done very slowly that impacts any users that have a firewall that DROPs packets with an apparently inexplicable delay of several seconds. If you really feel the need to do this, which the Slashdot team obviously does, it would be much quicker and less annoying for users do the scan at a faster rate without the two or three retries currently used. Better yet, kick the scan off in the background while the data is being entered data into the form and reject the post if necessary when the "Preview" or "Submit" button is clicked. Even if a post is submitted through an open proxy before the scan completes, Slashdot's delay between posts from the same IP will ensure that only one post can get through before the ban hammer comes down.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed 100%. The problem is that this is China we are talking about. A few years back here on Slashdot I likened the .cn ccTLD to a sewer due to the rampant abuse by spammers, port scans other attacks coming from their IP space and so on. The response from many admins was to blackhole the .cn domain and China's IP space en masse, something I predicted would come back to haunt them as more and more Chinese business tried to establish ties with the West and were unable to connect. I guess the Chinese government must have finally realised that too, because they have just implemented a completely draconian set of restrictions to .cn domain registrations that have seen several resellers stop selling sub-domains in .cn altogether.
.cn domain registrations, and equally likely that it will be far too late for at least some of the scientic journals that got their fingers burnt in the mean time.
Give it a couple of years and I suspect that we'll probably see a similar crackdown happen with the publishing of scientific papers in an attempt to rescue the reputation of Chinese science from whichever gutter it's languishing in by then. Chances are it will be just as draconian as with the
Don't worry. The Content Aware fill in the Extended version of Photoshop is more than up to that particular challenge - check out the demo! [YouTube video link for those at work]
Cool. I have a strategy that might work, but it involves getting the first piece dead centre in the bottom such that it creates a level "base", then building a platform up from that on which you can actually complete rows, albeit on a reduced height playing field. The pre-requistite is that the first piece is suitable for creating the platform which, depending on whether the screen width is an odd or even number of boxes across, is a different subset of the available pieces. If you get a "Z" or "S" piece to start though, I think it's pretty much game over, no matter what you do.
I'd say that this is most definitely NP, for humans and AI alike.
It depends what counts as a "Linux" install too. Linux isn't just the downloadable distros that you can install yourself; it includes all the Linux based devices like netbooks and countless other types of appliances that use highly customised versions of it. If you include the whole cornucopia of systems that use a Linux kernel at their core then I suspect that the most popular Linux "distro" might well turn out to be something completely unexpected and off the wall. As an example I've seen repeated claims (not sure whether they are correct or not though) that the most widely deployed CPU architecture and OS in the world are not actually x86 and Windows but ARM and RTOS respectively, precisely because of the vast number of embedded OSs lurking in everyday "white box" appliances like DVD players, TV sets, washing machines and so on.
I suspect someone's guesstimate may be off as just about every "most popular distro" statistic I've seen has consistently put Ubuntu ahead of Fedora pretty much since Ubuntu first arrived on the scene, except for brief periods immediately after new Fedora releases. Reconciling a 2:1 advantage for Fedora with that is kind of hard, but not impossible; lots of big corporates and SMEs use Red Hat, so Fedora would be a logical choice for their techies' personal use or installs where paying the Red Hat license fee isn't an option for whatever reason, and chances are they'd only download each release once. I'd guess that I used to run at a 6:1 install:download ratio when I was doing this with Fedora, and the German office did something simmilar with Novell/SuSE, so maybe both numbers are actually in the ballpark.
;)
Either way, these are not too shabby figures for Linux market penetration. I wonder how many of those installs are on the Desktop though?
True enough, but nuclear powered Mini Coopers? If anything goes wrong, that's going to take the line "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" to a whole new level of understatement...
Photoshop has had that capability natively (ie, not requiring a plugin) since CS4, this is the ability to select an object in an image - litter on a lawn was the example given in the article - and replace its former location in the image with content derived from the surrounding areas. Basically it's like an intelligent, automated version of the Clone Brush tool on steroids.
Link now up, although still a little light on details at the moment, expect updates soon.
Not even a link to a story yet, but the ticker on the BBC News home page is reporting that Google has announced that it has stopped censoring its search engine in China. Since China has already made her position clear on this eventuality I suppose this must mean that Google believes that it might as well be hanged for a wolf, than a lamb.
I'm nipping out for some popcorn; the next couple of days are going to be really interesting...
Someone else is already a virtual monopoly in China. Baidu is by far and away the most popular search engine in China and even Google is essentially an also ran, while Bing and Yahoo are barely above the level of being statistical noise.
If they are not picking IE at random, then they probably belong in my first group then, albeit with a change of descriptive text as whether the association is "Blue e = Internet" or with the name Microsoft is neither here nor there in context. I don't think that this group is necessarily as large as you might think though, in my experience the kind of person who falls into this set has a considerable overlap with the set of users that only upgrades their OS when they get a new computer.
Personally, I think this whole concept is a stupid idea that's right up there with some of the other brain dead excuses for legislative rulings that have come out of the EC, and won't change the status quo by meaningful amount. Once you've deducted the users who will pick a non-IE browser anyway and those who will pick IE based on either its icon or the name "Microsoft" regardless of its position on the screen, there are not too many users left. I doubt very much that when the next round of browser usage figures come in that there is going to be a significant shift towards non-IE browsers that could be attributed to the introduction of the Browser Selection Screen.
The only people where the selection and any possible bias inherent in the implementation of the random() function are the last group, which is also quite possibly the smallest of the three sets. In an ideal world, you are going to get a bellcurve with the optimum position being in the middle and the least favourable at the sides, so if Microsoft wants to implement random() so that IE is more likely to end up in the position that is joint least likely to be picked of the big five browsers, that's fine by me.
It's also apparently fine for Google's Chrome as well, so if you are anywhere near Ballmer's office in the next few days then I'd keep an eye out for any flying chairs, just in case...
Yeah, but if you actually remember the Sixties then you weren't there, man! Plus, you've got to figure that the double whammy of Alzheimer's and Senile Dementia is starting to creep up on Gen-X as well by now. All in all, I think it's quite understandable that they might have forgotten whether or not they even inhaled, let alone what the shit actually looked like, besides wasn't everything in trippy colours back then, I can't quite remember...
Immortality baby! Immortality!
I think that is what Microsoft is implying, without directly pointing a finger and risking a potential law suit.
Chances are that a lot of cells that are only now ending up in laptop batteries have spent quite some time sat on a warehouse shelf somewhere waiting out the financial downturn. Now that there are signs of recovery and people are buying laptops again, the production chain is starting up and those cells are finally going into laptop batteries. However, since the battery as a whole was only assembled last week, say, despite the fact that the component cells were manufactured last year, care to guess which date gets to go on the "Date of manufacture" sticker?
Well, not that you mention it... :)
Diatribe or not (no, I didn't bother to read it), I don't think Oracle's is going to be anywhere near the kind of situation Sun ended up in for the foreseeable future. Sun had multiple sources of direct competition across a good deal of their product range and many IT budgets just couldn't justify paying the extra cash for the few extras Sun brought to the equation. Oracle, on the otherhand, has seen off almost all of its competition: DB2, Ingres and Informix are either history or essentially relegated to also-rans in the marketplace for high-end DB servers with paid-for support and an SLA that you could take to court if you had to. It's going to take a screw-up of positively epic proportions for Oracle to go down the pan; "dropping the ball" wouldn't even come close...
You could just delete the certificate yourself. "Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Encryption, View Certificates"[1]. Select the one from CNNIC and hit "Delete".
:)
[1] "Tools, Options, Advanced, Advanced, View Certificates" if you are on Windows, but if you are on Windows the CNNIC certificate is probably not the most significant of your security worries...
There seems to be a little confusion over Wacom's product ranges here, but the device most people are probably thinking of is the Cintiq, not one of their more conventional tablets like the Intuos range. They do everything this new screen does and more, as they support all of the pressure and tilt detection routines of the tablets, so the only things that might be novel about this new screen is nature of the QTC technology being used or the cost of its production. Hopefully, the latter; the Cintiqs are a dream to use for retouching, painting or other freehand work, but frighteningly expensive!
Dyslexia... that would be my excuse if I were you... :-)
Maybe they plan on using a smaller drogue chute to try and get him the right way up first and reduce the speed of descent a little to lessen the strain on the main chute. wouldn't really matter quite so much if that tangles, as long as your design means that you can safely jettison it or otherwise get it out of the way before you deploy the main chute once things have settled down.
Presumably, he's planning on leaping from the balloon when it reaches its maximum altitude for the flight and is about to start it's inevitable descent. At that point his vertical velocity will be pretty near zero and so other than any residual lateral drift coming from the balloon any speed achieved will be entirely due to the influence of gravity. What isn't clear is whether he will be exceeding speed of sound at sea level, or just at his current altitude during the descent as well (it's not possible to do the former without also doing the latter).
Or, as with my case, the firewall on your router only provides one option for rejecting traffic, which is apparently to DROP. If I allow the IPs used by Slashdot through to the IPTables based firewall on my Linux box - which is on a public IP address and is configured to REJECT - then the delay become unnoticeable.
Anyway, since it only adds up to a few dozen syslog entries from Slashdot every few days amoungst the thousands of others coming in from script kiddies and bots I don't particularly care about the scanning so much as about the implementation. It's needlessly borked for everyone out there sitting behind a home router that either defaults to DROP or doesn't provide an option for REJECT, presumably because of the numerous "test your router" and "probe my ports" sites that were around a few years ago that promoted this approach.
Not SMTP; HTTP. The ports scanned are all common default ports for web proxy applications like Squid's :3128, various ":8080" type combinations and such like. I'd have to go digging through my logs to get the complete list, but I'd guess there are about a dozen ports checked in total.
What's so irksome about it is that it's a straight SYN scan done very slowly that impacts any users that have a firewall that DROPs packets with an apparently inexplicable delay of several seconds. If you really feel the need to do this, which the Slashdot team obviously does, it would be much quicker and less annoying for users do the scan at a faster rate without the two or three retries currently used. Better yet, kick the scan off in the background while the data is being entered data into the form and reject the post if necessary when the "Preview" or "Submit" button is clicked. Even if a post is submitted through an open proxy before the scan completes, Slashdot's delay between posts from the same IP will ensure that only one post can get through before the ban hammer comes down.