Why stop at corrupting data, when you can have way much more fun leaking it? ... someone thought about three years ago.
How many internal office memos were delivered to your inbox by Sircam?
Have you ever actually tried to buy an "indexed" game in Germany? Important distinction: "on the index" != "banned"! Doom 3 probably won't be on display in supermarkets but many small stores run by actual people who like games will have it. Find one of these and ask them (they're not allowed to advertise it).
Score 4, Funny.
That was my take on "I read Playboy [or any other pin-up mag] for the interviews" as well. Until last week, when I followed a deep link to a site I didn't know for an interview with James O'Barr (the guy that spent the better part of the eighties drawing the original The Crow comic book). It was only at the very bottom of the page, after reading the interview, that I saw some buttons saying "Recent photoset...". I had happened upon an online pin-up mag (with a somewhat goth/alternative slant) that I read for an interview!
As long as the occasional war driver can't see your WEP key through the window, I can't see what's wrong with saving it at an easily remembered, not net-accessible location, ie. on a post-it note.
To me, having a key that can be guessed by a dictionary attack while stopping at a traffic light seems worse.
The scripting language shootout to end all scripting language shootouts was done by Verity Stob in the May 2004 issue of Dr Dobb's. (Sorry, no link. I've read it printed on dead trees. Don't know if it's available online.) Absolutely hilarious, with some bits of bitter, disillusioned truth:
[section on ActionScript]
You don't like it then. No, quite wrong. I love it. Huh? It's just such fun, writing bits of code to manipulate the pretty colored shapes. Whee! Look how clever I am! This is much better than working. [section on Python] What's it like? Clean, modern, fully featured, elegant, extensible, scalable, object oriented. A version of VBScript from an antimatter universe. [...] So you use it? No. As a winding-down Delphi user, I have had my fill of "technically best." From now on, it's strictly "most popular" for me. Within reason.
Imagine a virus which is airborne like the flu, destroys the immune system like HIV AIDS, can be spread by contact like a rhinovirus, but can be manufactured and stored almost indefinitely - unlike bacterial biological weapons.
If you're into that kind of dystopia because it makes for interesting settings of science fiction novels, read Frank Herbert's (yes, the Dune guy) "The white plague". Much better written than everything Bill Joy is likely to put out and not as much focused on technology-gone-wrong. The more frightening aspect of the story is not the genetically engineered, highly contagious, and lethal virus itself, but the breakdown of civilization that ensues upon the news that such a thing exists and is in the wild.
Re:Caps Lock? Who cares about Caps Lock?
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
They still haven't even bothered to get rid of the Scroll Lock button yet...
Don't! From the xpdf manpage:
p Move to the previous page. Scrolls to the top of the page, unless scroll lock is turned on.
I actually do use that key! (And have Caps Lock be another Ctrl, and the Windows keys generate Meta.)
Apart from that: How many support calls ("Word is writing everything in uppercase!") does Caps Lock cause per $unit_of_time?
^U is not really a bash control sequence. The default readline bindings are just emulating what the Unix terminal driver (canonical mode) has been doing for decades: the default KILL key is ^U.
Moving from MHz/FSB/Cache/etc to a single common rating # would make things a lot easier for the consumer.
A single rating # would be just as useless as MHz numbers. There is no such thing as "true speed". Different users have different workloads. If you spent your time recompiling KDE, look at the gcc rating from the SPECint suite. If you want a decent framerate in Doom 3, wait for it to be released and run on different systems. Then upgrade. And if you just want Windows to boot faster -- clean up your autostart registry keys and forget about speed ratings.
Viruses happily keep on disrupting work and eating bandwidth long after the actual crime (releasing the virus) is done. How many UDP packets to port 1434 did you filter in the last 24 hours? SQL slammer is still very much alive.
Try freshmeat. "Scribus is a DTP program for Linux. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool for simple Desktop Publishing. It tries be as professional as possible."
One great piece of self-referential humour that did make it into a commercial release is the following, from Enchanter:
>read legend of the great implementers This legend, written in an ancient tongue, speaks of the creation of the world. A more absurd account can hardly be imagined. The universe, it seems, was created by "Implementers" who directed the running of great engines. These engines produced this world and others, strange and wondrous, as a test or puzzle for others of their kind. It goes on to state that these beings stand ready to aid those entrapped within their creation. The great magician- philosopher Helfax notes that a creation of this kind is morally and logically indefensible and discards the theory as "colossal claptrap and kludgery."
Mmh...the Enchanter games. At one time I spent so much time in Frotz (yes, I was a bit late to discover Infocom games) that I actually felt a bit helpless outside of it. The line
alias look=ls examine='ls -l'
in my.shrc actually did save me keystrokes (in retyped commands).
I can program a game like pacman using 1 joystick and no buttons.
Sure you can program a game like Pacman, Tetris, Breakout or Bomberman in $single_digit_number evenings. That's not the point. Someone had to come up with the game idea in the first place and realize that, while simple, it is good for hours and hours of fun.
That's not really new. From Concrete Mathematics, 2nd ed., p. 401: "Con artists know that p [the probability of the coin coming heads up] \approx 0.1 when you spin a newly minted U.S. penny on a smooth table. (The weight distribution makes Lincoln's head fall downward.)" And Knuth et al don't make it sound like they did the original research on this.
For those who were still in kindergarten when WP5.1 was market leader: F3 called up the help screens, while F1 was the universal "cancel" key (a bit like C-g in Emacs).
This is what Microsoft wants you to believe. Actually, Windows is easy to get started with, but near impossible to master. One reason is that the user doesn't get any documentation beyond "to do X, click here and there". Is there any place in the help files that, for each service running in a default NT or XP install, plainly states what it's for, what other services it depends on, and what there is to configure? (If so, please tell me.) I would feel a lot safer if I could tell DCOM to just bind to the local interface, but I don't know if that's possible and if so, how.
No, no, NO! This isn't "the best thing to help [a manned Mars mission] along". It is a huge set-back. It is Bush sr.'s "space exploration initiative" (Space Station Freedom, return to moon, manned Mars flight) all over again. Establishing a moon base (if it ever comes to that) is a huge detour. Read Bob Zubrin's "The case for Mars". The chapter discussing the SEI and what came of it is named "Mars the hard way" (page 45 in my copy).
It's people like the Bushs (and Nikita Khrushchev, perhaps) that give manned space flight a bad name (as a sole propaganda device).
MRI (Magnetic Reasonance Imaging) came from NRI (Nuclear RI)
No. The old name was NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) tomography, where NMR is the name of the particular quantum mechanical phenomenon that's exploited. There are other applications of this (e.g. NMR spectroscopy), so it did make sense to coin a name for its use in tomography. (Journalists still manage to mix everything up and write that the physics department of our local university recently got new hardware for making brain scans.)
A related example in radiology would be that the "X-ray" in X-ray CT (computed tomography) is usually dropped. Whether this is done for brevity or to avoid the "X-rays -> ionizing radiation -> cancerogenous" connotation, I don't know.
Gutenberg digital has been online for quite a while. I thought one point of digitizing something is that you have to do it only once. Is this a case of DRM, NIH or just plain ignorance?
No, I don't think so. The Forgent patent covered DCT-based image/video compression schemes (cut up your image into small blocks; apply a discrete cosine transform to each block; quantize the DCT coefficients, allocating little precision to high frequencies; do some sort of entropy coding on the quantized coefficients), i.e. JPEG and MPEG video. JPEG 2000 is wavelet-based and not covered by this patent, though I am somewhat worried by their choice of arithmetic coding as their entropy coding. I was under the impression that some aspect of implementing arithmetic coding was a little shady, patent-wise (but I don't have any hard facts on that).
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
Shows that there is no such thing as "open and patent free". Remember the "burn all GIFs" days? As PNG support wasn't widespread enough yet, many a GIF was reencoded into JPEG, as that was open and patent free. People thought.
if artists owned any share of the copyright after their CD hit the market...
Somewhat bitter humor from the booklet of Radiohead's Ok computer: "all songs are published by warner chappell ltd. lyrics used by kind permission even though we wrote them."
If humans had these ships they'd at least have have fins or something by the next season.
Have a look at these screenshots from Zak McKracken, IMHO still the most believable alien invasion story to date (tough "Mars Attacks" comes close). The alien mothership is at the bottom and...has fins or something, by the late 80s!
breaking the Geneva Convention by deliberatly destroying the civilian infrastructure for clean water
...thereby causing the death of more people than all weapons of mass distraction^Wdestruction combined have in the whole history of war (says UNICEF, among others)
Slashdot Mirror
Why stop at corrupting data, when you can have way much more fun leaking it?
... someone thought about three years ago.
How many internal office memos were delivered to your inbox by Sircam?
Have you ever actually tried to buy an "indexed" game in Germany? Important distinction: "on the index" != "banned"! Doom 3 probably won't be on display in supermarkets but many small stores run by actual people who like games will have it. Find one of these and ask them (they're not allowed to advertise it).
Score 4, Funny.
That was my take on "I read Playboy [or any other pin-up mag] for the interviews" as well. Until last week, when I followed a deep link to a site I didn't know for an interview with James O'Barr (the guy that spent the better part of the eighties drawing the original The Crow comic book). It was only at the very bottom of the page, after reading the interview, that I saw some buttons saying "Recent photoset...". I had happened upon an online pin-up mag (with a somewhat goth/alternative slant) that I read for an interview!
As long as the occasional war driver can't see your WEP key through the window, I can't see what's wrong with saving it at an easily remembered, not net-accessible location, ie. on a post-it note.
To me, having a key that can be guessed by a dictionary attack while stopping at a traffic light seems worse.
And Atlantis can be reached by hijacking a Nazi submarine and some pixel-perfect maneuvering. Bring some orichalcum to get the machinery going.
If you're into that kind of dystopia because it makes for interesting settings of science fiction novels, read Frank Herbert's (yes, the Dune guy) "The white plague". Much better written than everything Bill Joy is likely to put out and not as much focused on technology-gone-wrong. The more frightening aspect of the story is not the genetically engineered, highly contagious, and lethal virus itself, but the breakdown of civilization that ensues upon the news that such a thing exists and is in the wild.
Don't! From the xpdf manpage:
I actually do use that key! (And have Caps Lock be another Ctrl, and the Windows keys generate Meta.)Apart from that: How many support calls ("Word is writing everything in uppercase!") does Caps Lock cause per $unit_of_time?
SEE ALSO
termios(4)
A single rating # would be just as useless as MHz numbers. There is no such thing as "true speed". Different users have different workloads. If you spent your time recompiling KDE, look at the gcc rating from the SPECint suite. If you want a decent framerate in Doom 3, wait for it to be released and run on different systems. Then upgrade. And if you just want Windows to boot faster -- clean up your autostart registry keys and forget about speed ratings.
Viruses happily keep on disrupting work and eating bandwidth long after the actual crime (releasing the virus) is done. How many UDP packets to port 1434 did you filter in the last 24 hours? SQL slammer is still very much alive.
Try freshmeat. "Scribus is a DTP program for Linux. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool for simple Desktop Publishing. It tries be as professional as possible."
Mmh...the Enchanter games. At one time I spent so much time in Frotz (yes, I was a bit late to discover Infocom games) that I actually felt a bit helpless outside of it. The line
in mySure you can program a game like Pacman, Tetris, Breakout or Bomberman in $single_digit_number evenings. That's not the point. Someone had to come up with the game idea in the first place and realize that, while simple, it is good for hours and hours of fun.
That's not really new. From Concrete Mathematics, 2nd ed., p. 401: "Con artists know that p [the probability of the coin coming heads up] \approx 0.1 when you spin a newly minted U.S. penny on a smooth table. (The weight distribution makes Lincoln's head fall downward.)" And Knuth et al don't make it sound like they did the original research on this.
For those who were still in kindergarten when WP5.1 was market leader: F3 called up the help screens, while F1 was the universal "cancel" key (a bit like C-g in Emacs).
This is what Microsoft wants you to believe. Actually, Windows is easy to get started with, but near impossible to master. One reason is that the user doesn't get any documentation beyond "to do X, click here and there". Is there any place in the help files that, for each service running in a default NT or XP install, plainly states what it's for, what other services it depends on, and what there is to configure? (If so, please tell me.) I would feel a lot safer if I could tell DCOM to just bind to the local interface, but I don't know if that's possible and if so, how.
No, no, NO! This isn't "the best thing to help [a manned Mars mission] along". It is a huge set-back. It is Bush sr.'s "space exploration initiative" (Space Station Freedom, return to moon, manned Mars flight) all over again. Establishing a moon base (if it ever comes to that) is a huge detour. Read Bob Zubrin's "The case for Mars". The chapter discussing the SEI and what came of it is named "Mars the hard way" (page 45 in my copy).
It's people like the Bushs (and Nikita Khrushchev, perhaps) that give manned space flight a bad name (as a sole propaganda device).
...from the ill-fated Miranda/AJ romance (storyline starts a few days earlier, Nov 6).
MRI (Magnetic Reasonance Imaging) came from NRI (Nuclear RI)
No. The old name was NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) tomography, where NMR is the name of the particular quantum mechanical phenomenon that's exploited. There are other applications of this (e.g. NMR spectroscopy), so it did make sense to coin a name for its use in tomography. (Journalists still manage to mix everything up and write that the physics department of our local university recently got new hardware for making brain scans.)
A related example in radiology would be that the "X-ray" in X-ray CT (computed tomography) is usually dropped. Whether this is done for brevity or to avoid the "X-rays -> ionizing radiation -> cancerogenous" connotation, I don't know.
Gutenberg digital has been online for quite a while. I thought one point of digitizing something is that you have to do it only once. Is this a case of DRM, NIH or just plain ignorance?
No, I don't think so. The Forgent patent covered DCT-based image/video compression schemes (cut up your image into small blocks; apply a discrete cosine transform to each block; quantize the DCT coefficients, allocating little precision to high frequencies; do some sort of entropy coding on the quantized coefficients), i.e. JPEG and MPEG video. JPEG 2000 is wavelet-based and not covered by this patent, though I am somewhat worried by their choice of arithmetic coding as their entropy coding. I was under the impression that some aspect of implementing arithmetic coding was a little shady, patent-wise (but I don't have any hard facts on that).
Shows that one should use media that is open and patent free (such as ogg/png/etc) after all...
Shows that there is no such thing as "open and patent free". Remember the "burn all GIFs" days? As PNG support wasn't widespread enough yet, many a GIF was reencoded into JPEG, as that was open and patent free. People thought.
Somewhat bitter humor from the booklet of Radiohead's Ok computer: "all songs are published by warner chappell ltd. lyrics used by kind permission even though we wrote them."
Have a look at these screenshots from Zak McKracken, IMHO still the most believable alien invasion story to date (tough "Mars Attacks" comes close). The alien mothership is at the bottom and...has fins or something, by the late 80s!