Fully agree with you. If I was provided with a LibreOffice (or Word) screen and told to take notes on it, it would have been a torture for me. But with Org-mode and a Dvorak keyboard I feel much more comfortable than with pen and paper. I also wrote my masters in Org-mode. The ability to use Git also helped me a lot to control how my text evolved.
I don't see any information on how the students were taking notes on their machines. Just "taking notes on laptops" may mean anything.
I wouldn't be able to take any notes in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. But in Org-mode I actually take notes more efficiently than I can do than on paper.
To me the greatest advantage of digital notes over pen and paper is that I can extend a topic when I acquire additional information on it (whereas on paper there's usually no physical space to do that), reorganize them by merging related notes into a single unit and also search through them.
Also, I type much faster than I write and I can shape and transform my notes very easily with Org-mode.
But actually I'd prefer if there was some collaborative note-taking going on instead of the huge duplication of work as it is now. Something like wiki-notes, where the purpose of taking notes would be not to recreate them each time but to make them better over time and update them.
If you visit the page using Firefox with JavaScript disabled, they suggest you to download Google's Chrome, i.e. to give even more of your data to NSA. We should at least recommend Chromium (the open-source part of Chrome) in such cases instead of the binary distribution from Google.
I'm using Wordpress on a few personal blog-like projects but I think I'll stick at Drupal as my main platform, because my main requirement is flexibility and modularity. I'm currenly trying to build a blank html5boilerplate-based theme in drupal to see how it goes. And what do you use?
I was using MODx Revolution for around two years, and it has many good sides, about which you can read on their website, in the books they published and in their wiki. But there are also some issues that led me to seeking an alternative now. MODx developers, please take this as an attempt of constructive criticism (and sorry for my imperfect English).
Too much is stored in the db, and that makes it very hard to work with git. Even with the 'static elements' functionallity one must have the actual 'element' in the database even if the code is stored in a file.
Poor performance of the backend. The backend is implemented entirely on ExtJS and is slow. Despite it's ExtJS it still requires to reload the page too often.
Very hard to develop own stuff on top of it. Just take a look at the tutorial on creating an extension (called 'extra'). I've developed different 'extras' to implement custom functionality in my projects, and I constantly had the feeling that they just made simple things much overcomplicated.
Poor documentation. Just take a look on their API docs. For example, the documentation for the modX::addExtensionPackage() function just says: "Add an extension package to MODX", and no information on the arguments besides what types they are.
Some serious problems in the core. For example, the widely used function modX::getChunk() has a performance bottleneck and can't be used in anything like, for instance, displaying a big list of products on a page, despite that this is exactly what it's for. If one instead reuses a same chunk object to iterate through a set of DB records (using $chunk->process()), the performance is dramatically increased. This issue has been reported on the forums, but didn't catch much attention (I can't even find the thread now.) The getChunk() function is widely used in some very important modx extensions, and yet the performance bottleneck doesn't seem to bother to the MODx community.
This isn't the full list. This is just some random (but major) inconveniences I can recall right now. To me, MODx is a great idea which for some reason wasn't implemented well.
France and Russia are very different states indeed, but it's interesting that Russian Wikipedia had a similar incident recently. The Russian Wikimedia received a request from the government to remove the 'Cannabis smoking' article from Russian Wikipedia (see google-translated version). The request in an ultimate manner states that if the article won't be removed during 24 hours then 'the hosting provider is obliged to limit access to such website' (haha, hosting provider from USA?) and if the hosting provider refuses to do that, then 'the IP address of the website will be listed in a database of addresses to whish ISP's will limit access'. The request PDF is here.
I agree. By (consciously) using the word "hacking" instead of "cracking" when refering to activity related to circumventing computer security we show our disrespect of those who contributed to the development of computing as we know it and who once asked us to differentiate the costructive "hacking" from the destructive "cracking". This is an example of constructive "cracking" though which is a special case.
If we rephrase your question into "Why do people obey when they get ordered to do bad things?" then this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo may explain some of the core problems with that (although it obviously shows much more extreme cases, sometimes even hard to watch.)
You're right and I absolutely agree with you. The only thing which I didn't like is what you have already said: the closeness and Windows-only-ness of their visual programming language. I'd probably add that it would be best if there were 3 or more different kinds of free and open-source learning environments which the kids could try and play with so that they know that a program is only a realization of a concept and the concept is independent of the program, i.e. they could learn to adapt to different UIs and mechanisms and achieve their goals in different environments.
What they do is they train kids as monkeys to press font buttons in Word. This is in fact an example of anti-education. Instead of helping the kids to understand how computer thinks and how to talk to it, they're forcing them to do completely wrong things like changing font size to make headings, etc. I actually remember that a "teacher" in the school I finished once disallowed me to help a girl by enabling a frequently used toolbar in that stupid Word! The teacher decided that she is supposed to change the font size though menu + dialog box... So is this education? And that teacher still works there.
P.S. I hate word processors. They encourage people to do everything by hand. That is computer anti-usage. One has to let the computer do the dirty job of aligning headings, generating indexes, etc. But that's not what the default toolbars suggest. And if they wanted users to think semantically, then they should not have called the functionality "Styles". This is everything upside-down.
P.P.S. I hate when a program treats the user as a monkey. And that's the role they teach kids: to be a monkey in front of Microsoft Word.
Microsoft said "a number of primary schools" already teach computer science using simple programmes like Microsoft’s Kodu, a visual programming language made specifically for creating games, although there is currently no formal programme of training for teachers, admitted Microsoft.
Exactly. It has both meanings, but most people don't know that. If we used the word more carefully, we'd be educating more people that there's some difference between those hackers who have built Gnu/Linux, and those who and steal money from bank accounts. The problem is that most people don't know the other meaning. Why not let them know by occasionally using the 'cr' instead of 'h'? It's only one extra byte.
This is a cracking contest: the goal is to break stuff. If the goal was to write a new compiler or OS, then I would call it hacking. Yep, only geeks use that word that way, but isn't Slashdot a geeky site? I believe it's a good idea to promote the distinction between hacking and cracking, because otherwise Gnu/Linux (and possibly things like Wikipedia) could be called 'cancer' again. And yet they are the opposite.
Thank you for your detailed explanation. I'm an amateur programmer with very little C experience (and very little knowledge of the low-level stuff), so it may take time for me to grasp the mechanism, but your post is very helpful. I want to be sure I'm not giving the destructive people any opportunity to break into my almost "[w]holly free" OS:)
It might be possible to use the very same method to exploit other browsers
as other browsers give similar opportunities to the exploit writer. I don't want
to sound crazy but even other Operating Systems might be affected by this, yet
unconfirmed.
Is it possible to "rewrite the instruction pointer of the processor to a known heap address
where the shellcode resides quite deterministic" on, say, Firefox on Gnu/Linux [given that flash and java are disabled in the browser]?
Slashdot Mirror
Fully agree with you. If I was provided with a LibreOffice (or Word) screen and told to take notes on it, it would have been a torture for me. But with Org-mode and a Dvorak keyboard I feel much more comfortable than with pen and paper. I also wrote my masters in Org-mode. The ability to use Git also helped me a lot to control how my text evolved.
I don't see any information on how the students were taking notes on their machines. Just "taking notes on laptops" may mean anything.
I wouldn't be able to take any notes in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. But in Org-mode I actually take notes more efficiently than I can do than on paper.
To me the greatest advantage of digital notes over pen and paper is that I can extend a topic when I acquire additional information on it (whereas on paper there's usually no physical space to do that), reorganize them by merging related notes into a single unit and also search through them.
Also, I type much faster than I write and I can shape and transform my notes very easily with Org-mode.
But actually I'd prefer if there was some collaborative note-taking going on instead of the huge duplication of work as it is now. Something like wiki-notes, where the purpose of taking notes would be not to recreate them each time but to make them better over time and update them.
I use Org all the time. I even wrote my masters in it (exported to LaTeX and PDF).
If you visit the page using Firefox with JavaScript disabled, they suggest you to download Google's Chrome, i.e. to give even more of your data to NSA. We should at least recommend Chromium (the open-source part of Chrome) in such cases instead of the binary distribution from Google.
Wouldn't it be less ambiguous to say they cracked the system instead of hacked it? When will we show our respect to the guys who call themselves hackers for creating free operating system kernels?
I'm sorry, I misused the term 'backend'. I meant their so-called 'manager' interface, i.e. the admin panel. It uses ExtJS.
I'm using Wordpress on a few personal blog-like projects but I think I'll stick at Drupal as my main platform, because my main requirement is flexibility and modularity. I'm currenly trying to build a blank html5boilerplate-based theme in drupal to see how it goes. And what do you use?
I was using MODx Revolution for around two years, and it has many good sides, about which you can read on their website, in the books they published and in their wiki. But there are also some issues that led me to seeking an alternative now. MODx developers, please take this as an attempt of constructive criticism (and sorry for my imperfect English).
This isn't the full list. This is just some random (but major) inconveniences I can recall right now. To me, MODx is a great idea which for some reason wasn't implemented well.
France and Russia are very different states indeed, but it's interesting that Russian Wikipedia had a similar incident recently. The Russian Wikimedia received a request from the government to remove the 'Cannabis smoking' article from Russian Wikipedia (see google-translated version). The request in an ultimate manner states that if the article won't be removed during 24 hours then 'the hosting provider is obliged to limit access to such website' (haha, hosting provider from USA?) and if the hosting provider refuses to do that, then 'the IP address of the website will be listed in a database of addresses to whish ISP's will limit access'. The request PDF is here.
I agree. By (consciously) using the word "hacking" instead of "cracking" when refering to activity related to circumventing computer security we show our disrespect of those who contributed to the development of computing as we know it and who once asked us to differentiate the costructive "hacking" from the destructive "cracking". This is an example of constructive "cracking" though which is a special case.
If we rephrase your question into "Why do people obey when they get ordered to do bad things?" then this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo may explain some of the core problems with that (although it obviously shows much more extreme cases, sometimes even hard to watch.)
The summary is quoting the blog post. It seems that the code was updated after the blog post was written.
The author of the blog post states that Microsoft required at least 64kb for Windows 8 machines.
You're right and I absolutely agree with you. The only thing which I didn't like is what you have already said: the closeness and Windows-only-ness of their visual programming language. I'd probably add that it would be best if there were 3 or more different kinds of free and open-source learning environments which the kids could try and play with so that they know that a program is only a realization of a concept and the concept is independent of the program, i.e. they could learn to adapt to different UIs and mechanisms and achieve their goals in different environments.
What they do is they train kids as monkeys to press font buttons in Word. This is in fact an example of anti-education. Instead of helping the kids to understand how computer thinks and how to talk to it, they're forcing them to do completely wrong things like changing font size to make headings, etc. I actually remember that a "teacher" in the school I finished once disallowed me to help a girl by enabling a frequently used toolbar in that stupid Word! The teacher decided that she is supposed to change the font size though menu + dialog box... So is this education? And that teacher still works there.
P.S. I hate word processors. They encourage people to do everything by hand. That is computer anti-usage. One has to let the computer do the dirty job of aligning headings, generating indexes, etc. But that's not what the default toolbars suggest. And if they wanted users to think semantically, then they should not have called the functionality "Styles". This is everything upside-down.
P.P.S. I hate when a program treats the user as a monkey. And that's the role they teach kids: to be a monkey in front of Microsoft Word.
No comment.
This is very good news. Thank you for sharing your experience.
works out of the box on anything Gecko or Webkit based plus Opera (IE not supported).
Glad to hear there are people who sell things without IE support to businesses. World's changing for the better.
Exactly. It has both meanings, but most people don't know that. If we used the word more carefully, we'd be educating more people that there's some difference between those hackers who have built Gnu/Linux, and those who and steal money from bank accounts. The problem is that most people don't know the other meaning. Why not let them know by occasionally using the 'cr' instead of 'h'? It's only one extra byte.
Someone has to be "goddamn pedantic".
This is a cracking contest: the goal is to break stuff. If the goal was to write a new compiler or OS, then I would call it hacking. Yep, only geeks use that word that way, but isn't Slashdot a geeky site? I believe it's a good idea to promote the distinction between hacking and cracking, because otherwise Gnu/Linux (and possibly things like Wikipedia) could be called 'cancer' again. And yet they are the opposite.
Same here.
Thank you for your detailed explanation. I'm an amateur programmer with very little C experience (and very little knowledge of the low-level stuff), so it may take time for me to grasp the mechanism, but your post is very helpful. I want to be sure I'm not giving the destructive people any opportunity to break into my almost "[w]holly free" OS:)
It might be possible to use the very same method to exploit other browsers as other browsers give similar opportunities to the exploit writer. I don't want to sound crazy but even other Operating Systems might be affected by this, yet unconfirmed.
Is it possible to "rewrite the instruction pointer of the processor to a known heap address where the shellcode resides quite deterministic" on, say, Firefox on Gnu/Linux [given that flash and java are disabled in the browser]?