Comics that aren't funny delivered directly to my door in book form that is vastly inferior to the form I get free online?
Can it get any better than this???
Oh, ID ten T. Funny. Yes, it is good to insult those who have not specialized their intelligence in the same areas as us. I do so enjoy it when my dental hygenist laughs at me and rolls her eyes when I don't floss.
The test drive runs HORRIDLY on my g3 500 (it's an expensive laptop i haven't paid off yet, so i'm not getting a new one for a few years), so slow that the AD&D 2nd Edition Character Generator is unusable, while the original runs great under 9.2.1. I'm really bummed to hear that EVERYBODY isn't in the same boat as me.
Nice screenshot...love the Audion skin, i use that one meself.
HTML for all text? 3d built into the subsystem? Virtual Machines and OODMBS?
Sounds to me like a beefy version of Java3d, which while not an OS, I've always thought should be the basis for one. Who doesn't want a natively multi threaded high security OS with the "metal" LaF and true object oriented design? Plus, by devoting all system reources to the VM, we might actually get Java that could respond on an older system...
I write in Java using a text editor and I haven't written to my registry in months.
In fact, when I first got here my system was locked down like a prisoner by accident (they thought I was an intern...god I hate being young) and I didn't notice for four months, and then only because I installed JDK 1.3.1 (which wanted to change my JavaPath).
Yes, Java CAN interface with the registry, but it's a heck of a lot easier to use object dumps and ini files (in xml of course). And since things don't need to be "registered" (more trouble than it's worth) due to the namespace and classpath, you end up with a very nice sandbox development environment.
I wish this effing COM object I've been trying to teach how to use the network all morning were written in java...
Wow. Poster must be wholly unable to think different. No HD because it (if it exists) is a PDA and needs a low power solution. No NIC because it (again, if it exists) has airport and doesn't need wires. MacOSX has no NIC and I mount NFS.
Get your head out of your 486 and welcome to the 21st century. And if you want a portable UNIX machine, buy a small PC.
Yeah, marketeers of the industry. No substance to any of their products. There was no substance at all in the first card expandable desktop PC (Apple 2), the first portable pc, the first windowing laptop, the first internet appliance, the first PDA, the first machine with Firewire, the first PC that could burn DVDs or in the first computer with a 16x9 aspect ratio.
You PC enthusiasts sure come up with a lot of useful ideas. Subscription operating systems? Pop up ads for "free" internet? You guys are fucking geniuses
Developers all over -- the sort that don't have web pages because they're too busy debugging -- oppose open source. I'm one of them, to a degree, and our entire staff here is much more fanatical than I.
It has far less to do with moral issues or "what OS is better" -- many of these guys work on or with open source code fairly often. I run Cobalt Linux on my development webserver because that's what it came with and the logisitics of installing Sco or BSD over an rlogin is frightening. But I'm uneasy about it.
Why? Because in many ways it threatens our jobs! The problem with true open source programming when you're a lifetime developer for a large solution provider is that it suddenly becomes less feasible to develop custom solutions than to pay exorbitant licenses. A lot of the applications I've developed have been very similar to tasks you could probably perform in Access or Excel -- were it not for the cost of deployment of these packages. These apps were written from the ground up, they are very specialized niche pieces which are perfectly matched to what our workers have to do. Now, consider what would happens when an open office solution comes along and does something similar to what Access does. Suddenly, you don't need a programmer to build your application, all you need is a scripter. A scripter is much cheaper, and I get my walking papers.
Now a lot of you might chime in about how I'm technically doing too much work, or how I can transition to a "support" role (find a supporter who makes six digits and you'll have found a man with a silver tongue) or how the elimination of senior programmers is in someway good for the company. But the solutions I provide are easy to support because they only operate in one way, they're easier to learn for our customers and the code is well known by everybody here because we developed them part and parcel. The initial cost of open source seems low, but the support cost of pouring over lines of code written by god knows who using god knows what style to find some bug that may or may not be known and then fixing and releasing the fix legally under the license of the code is much higher -- rather than employ one programmer for a few hours to fix a bug he knows about, you're faced with either hiring a consultant at exorbitant rates to fix the bug or a scripter for a couple days to research, fix and release the patch.
I like getting free software, but promoting open source is something that is very delicate in our industry. It's harder and more expensive to support, extend (with exceptions, apache is much easier to modify than IIS, but in my experience that's very rare among open source projects) and deploy than homebrewed software, and often has no associated costs to use yet it purports to be "free as in speech not as in beer." It's really hard to get people to pay for steak when you're giving them hamburgers for free!
I just love hacking around in my cassiopeia. Not only is it nice and small so it can be played with wherever, but it has an easy to use ide (embedded visual studio) and a serial port just waiting to be hacked. I've convered it into a mini code reader and have been working on writing software to make the unit act as an oscilloscope.
The price? Well...a new one's going to run you about 500$, but we don't need a new one...we need something we can conscientiously hack. Mine was a refurb developer's model which cost my lovely mother $200 with a 90 day warranty direct from casio.com.
I'm an electrical engineering student, not a computer geek
WHAT? Electrical Engineers are the worst type of computer nerd, what with their pripensity for tinkering with sickly 8088 processors in labs and using software that predates keyboards. As we said in college, you can't even spell geek without E.E.
Asking people to use another language when dealing with machines -- especially one that's more visceral -- is just asking for trouble. Already computers are seriously affecting the ability of humans to communicate orally, by concentrating the language into short bursts used during chats we lose the particles of sentences that help establish context in speech (yes, there is a reason for "the" and "a"). Besides, here's an oppurtunity to elleviate a lot of the bad habits that make dialectic English so tough to understand for those outside the dialect: set the machines to understand one sort of English, so that everybody has to speak at least that type along with their colloquial speech. Of course, there's always the possibility for eugenic practices with this, so my proposal is this: teach the computer the differences between the 8 vowel sounds used by people in Colorado, where pretty much every vowel approaches the schwa (the schwa being the neutral position for the human vocal system and therefore easiest to pronounce). After a while, people will realise that to be successful at using voice activated systems, they'll need to adjust their inflection, and after a while will adjust it automatically when dealing with people who don't understand them, either.
But voice activated systems are stupid, anyway...speech is one of the slowest forms of human interaction, and is one of the few we have to actively concentrate on to perform. You know when people say, "Think before you speak?" That's because once you start speaking a large portion of your brain activity is devoted to doing so...it actually becomes harder to think about what to say next. Pressing a button or turning a dial takes practically no thought...which is another reason why a speech written in spontaneous draft still sounds better than one that is spoken aloud. If we convert machines to speach recognition, we're effectively asking people to interact with them in dumber ways. And can you imagine the logic involved with processing a fairly simple statement like "This check in my hand should be processed by you and in return i'd like fifty bucks in tens and ten one dollar bills." Since the command isn't linear, the machine not only has to recognize what each word means, but try and interpret them in queue. And if humans can't construct complicated sentences like the one above -- which any human over the age of about 4 can understand, before that kids can't identify the subject and object in complex sentences -- they'll be inconvenienced by speaking machines. Oh and for a simpler example, try this: "My pin number? 376 uhhhhhh...Forty-two thirteen...aaaaaaaaaaaand...is it six? no. Eight?...oh! oh! sixty eight!" A human can understand that...we'd be annoyed, but we'd get it.
MySQL has been mired in the stone ages of Dbase4 for years; these will be welcom additions and will definitely help MySQL overtake some of its lofty closed source competitors.
Me, I'm sticking with PostGreSQL. But I applaud the effort of the developers to make their application into something that DBAs worldwide can feel proud to add to their resumes.
I wonder if the estate of Jonathan Swift can sue both their asses, as Gulliver's Travels came out more than a century before the filming of Reckless Kelly.
Incidentally, great film. Kelly: "Dog, go get dan. GO GET DAN!" Dog: "Cornflakes." Kelly: "Stupid Dog!"
At my university, you are pretty much expected to work in groups, to the point that some professors assign them at the beginning of the semester and all of them warn you of the dangers of stealing. They do this because CS CAN BE TOUGH, especially for some of the non-techs that were in my CS department. We got a lot of students who were aiming for careers in consulting, IT or MIS and needed a degree but not necessarily the knowledge. Knowing this, most professors expect you to work in groups, where you can design alogirthms and modules together but present different finished projects. After all, five students debugging a stack is a lot more efficient than each doing it alone. Furthurmore, since our school gets mainly foreign graduate students as TAs, who are often hard to understand or who don't have any formal teaching instruction, we often get together in groups where students help each other understand difficult concepts -- the notes from these sessions generates code that may seem stolen.
However, I hated working in groups, mostly because I ended up doing all the work. It seems to me that this sort of groupwork encourages slacking -- certainly, I had a number of logic design labs where I did all the work while my partner tried to score with the engineering babes. As a defence mechanism, I developed a series of coding styles that mildly obfuscated my code in such a way that cheaters who didn't really reengineer it before submission would be handily caught...namely, I began developing a style which involved a lot of recursion, some unusual object style modularity (a lot of inlining, a trick most students don't use for clarity's sake) and so forth. I also made sure to hand in all the labs slightly ahead of anybody who i was "helping." My professors (I have one in mind, an adjunct who worked at IBM during the day) usually caught on pretty quick that I knew what I was doing and that if other people submitted code that looked similar to mine it was probably a result of group debugging and not copying or cheating. In any event, the key is to DO your own work even when working in a group...to understand modules you use even if they're written by other people. Otherwise, you'll not have the knowledge necesary to transcend the next level -- which is why so many people who pass our CS 240 (data structures) fail out when they hit CS 340 (OOP -- built on the concepts of 240).
Ok, this is useless. Stephen Wright has a joke about an existential map at a department store that said 'You are Here' all over it, and for our purposes "low resolution" is about the same. 30 meters is a lot...hell, 10 meters is a lot...and i'd much rather rely on my eye and a reference object than a measurement that tells me when I'm in a "zone".
Casio released a WinCE device similar to their e-125 with very similar ruggedness specs (and yes, you COULD hack it to run Pocket Linux. Not that you'd want to). They also released a wireless model and a bunch of other cool stuff that nobody has ever seen, because Casio didn't market ANY of these. They were mostly sold through catalogs for commercial applications and in Japan (BTW, japanese handwriting recognition software has to be seen to be beleived...no crummy "Jot" notation there!)
Links to casio: EG 800 Ruggedized PC http://www.casio.com/personalpcs/product.cfm?secti on=145&market=0&product=1880
By the way, I love Casio's name for these devices..."Personal PCs," the connotation that these machines are not mere "assistants," but real PCs that are always handy and could someday replace the desktop (or at least heavily offset it). And as the machines get smaller and more rugged, we get closer to the geek ideal of "wearables" that will run our lives: reminding us to feed our cats, telling us if our outfit matches, and generating fractal pickup lines that work every time.
You know, Microsoft's current policys, coming as they do in a time of belt tightening, are the best thing that has ever happened to me -- as an advocate of Macs and UNIX!
You see, there isn't just one useful GUI OS for PCs...there are a couple dozen, of which two of my favorites are Solaris and Mac OS X. Each of these is more reliable and in some ways faster than windows XP, each is more customizable graphically and each has a full suite of applications that run under them. And there's very low upgrade costs -- OS X's new upgrade costs $20 for a CD which can be used on every installation you can find! Combine this with both systems having painless hardware upgrades that don't require reinstalling the OS, and I find that Microsoft's marketeers are doing my pro-Graphical UNIX preaching for me!
Acutally, turns out my 10 meters was liberal wishful thinking. Here's the straight poop from Garmin's website and FAQ:
"With the end of Selective Availability, you can expect horizontal accuracy of 20m to 35m (60' to 105') for older 8 channel units and 7m to 15m (21' to 45') for newer 12 parallel channel units in good reception conditions. For altitude you can expect accuracy to range from +/- 75m (225') for an 8 channel unit and +/- 35m (105') for 12 parallel channel units in good reception conditions. There are a number of environmental conditions that can effect GPS accuracy due to varying satellite signal reception conditions and can therefore lead to better or worse accuracy's than listed above. The satellite status page on most GARMIN GPS units will provide a real-time estimate of the relative accuracy of the position reported by the GPS receiver. "
So that's accurate within 7 meters if you have a good GPS (fucking expensive) and something more like 25m if you have a regular one. You call that accurate? When trying to find a three foot wide path in a heavily wooded area, knowing that I have between 49 and 625 square feet between where the device says I am and where I actually am is little comfort. In face, it's more what we in the software industry call "fucking useless."
I'm a proud owner of a Cassiopeia E-100, the first colour handheld ever. It's aging quite nicely -- the processor is only 133 MHz, but that's MIPS and not this cheap-slow-crunches-x86-code-easily StrongARM BS that looks nice on benchmarks but can't feed graphics to save its life. The problem is that the E-100 is stuck in time, there's not really much development going on for Windows CE 2.11 and the developers who used to give us a hand-me-down build when compiling for 3.0 usually just blow us off entirely. Some of the new graphics APIs, which don't really have a parellel in Pocket Linux are very swift and are allowing handhelds to really blow up the market with features like full motion video, great VNC support, and really bitchin' audio interfaces.
What, say those of you still stuck in the dark ages of the "i can do anything a pencil and paper can do, only 500 times more expensive" PalmOS, why would you want motion video? Well, because it's terribly useful for making a lot of the things you want a palmtop for more descriptive. Take, for example, the latest topographical software that comes with TopoUSA (a maptech product I think). It can display a 3d gradient of an area. Not too useful? I beg to differ. There have been a number of times up in the 'dacks where I've bivouaced up a mountain and come down on the totally wrong side. I can't read contour lines for shit, because I don't have a degree in geography. With the isometric view that this topo software provides, i could just input the direction i was facing, and scroll until the terrain matched what I was seeing (no, GPS wouldn't be useful here, because it would be at least ten meters off...and in a land of overgrown trails and thousand foot cliffs, ten meters is a lot). There are lots of other uses for a decent graphics API, too, such as video conferencing and web browsing.
However, this new iPaq still has the same crummy 12 bit downsampled (meaning that the proc takes time to shave off the extra 4 bits) screen as its predessors. So while the processor is faster, the display (which is the biggest bottleneck, pocketpcpassion.com had a benchmark showing that even the E-100 could beat the 32 meg iPaq to the screen using the old graphics APIs) is slow as it ever was. Kind of a shame, considering all the features...like putting a big engine, big gas tank, great stereo, leather seats, GPS and handheld telephone into a nice little lightweight chassis, and then gearing it for torque.
Microsoft would NEVER steal code or concepts without giving credit or licensing the technology...because they know that giant corporations are lawsuit fodder. Here's a couple of lines from the "About" box in IE 5.0:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd.
Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc.
Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
And so on, in plain view, right where it should be. Evil corporation? Maybe. But not so evil that they don't give shout outs to their forefathers. Not that I'm claiming that this little mistake makes RedHat bad or anything -- just that all the anti - windows folks should realize that !Free != !Friendly.
Many of you who view slashdot from a Linux box may never have seen a DVD before, and can obviously live without them since Linux doesn't have any legal DVD software. Some of you may never have seen a "windowing operating system," either (they're great, you don't have to type nearly as much and sometimes you even get pictures). But you need to understand something: when you buy a $2500+ machine, which claims to be, among other things, a DVD player, you had better well be able to play DVDs on it. Now, I got mine for only $400, and I'm fairly proficient at multibooting (my windows PC runs BSD, Be, Win 98 and Windows 2000) so i'm only slightly pissed at OS-X's severe lacking in the DVD department. But many people, for whom the mac is the one machine to rule them all, are goddamn pissed at the lack of DVD support. When you insert a DVD, an icon proclaiming "DVD!" appears on your desktop to mock you. And besides: with the excellent BSD operating system underneath us, maybe Mac users can finally get a little DVD -> MPEG action without begging our linux and windows friends to rip vob files for us.
I've been using OSX for a while, and it is a real dog on any chip other than a G4. It's always been usable, but the windows don't have the snap-into-action feel that they need to satisfy an old Win2k afficianado such as myself. Furthermore, the OS was missing a lot of essential features, DVD being the most prominent, that are coming in full effect. Also exciting is the movement of a couple of important indicators to the empty space on the apple bar...my dock quickly fills up and I can't wait to lose things like the battery indicator that don't really need to be so big. Here's hoping the developers of such great dock apps as LoadInDock, Memory Manager, TempInDock (immeasurably useful, so you don't put a 140 degree lappy onto your legs while wearing shorts) and so on. It seems most of the visibility "enhancements" are just the hidden options in OS 10.4, unlockable via tweak panels...but it'll be nice to have more efficient effects like the scale available from a System Preference.
Ahhh, 10.1...OSX is finally a real operating system. Thank you, blue fairy!
How would an individual in a cashless society buy marijuana, pornography, stolen laptops or big bags of Doritos despite being on a low carb diet? Cash leaves no paper trail, is universally acceptable by people who aren't really a "business" in the IRS-tracks-our-every move sense and has a sort of a global backing. It is the only form of payment accepted in thousands of small shops, bars, clubs, and in many foreign countries, it's the only way to tip a bellhop who nabs you a box of condoms and doesn't tell your wife about the chick you met at Mac World and it's the only way to get out of an expensive speeding ticket without lying to a judge.
In short, a cashless society would be nice for following our finances, but it reduces a lot of our liberties -- mainly, the right to buy things without anybody (especially not our creditors) knowing what they are. Plus, it's so much fun to do that thing where you make Lincoln stand upside down after a couple joints and a brew-dog.
Backdoored Encryption? Who would buy it?
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Blaming Encryption
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· Score: 2
The whole idea of encrypting a message is that there is only one way to open it: with the password/key/pattern that was used to encrypt it. With a backdoor, there becomes two ways to open it: with a password/key/pattern, and a backdoor key. Now, you say, only the guvment has the key. This is true. But who's in the government? People just like you and me, people who are not incorruptable, people who steal evidence and sell confiscated drugs and who take bribes. Which is an interesting thing to think about: if people have the key, then it makes sense that other people will eventually get the key. It's not a physical structure, it's a copyable string of bits that would eventually trickle down until everybody in the world had a key to the encryption, and unlike a physical lock you can't just replace it with a new key. Backdoored encryption would be secure for no more than a few years, then it would be as open after a fashion as pig latin.
This is of course assuming there's one code that opens all or most encrypted files (one ring to rule them all). There's also the possibility that the government will just require you to submit any keys to a private repository, which would of course be hacked by Eaglesoft faster than you can say "ACLU."
And besides, how can you enforce this when 256-1024 bit encryption exists throughout the world already? You can't round up software, hell i can hide a copy of BestCrypt on my machine for future use and then make a dozen copies when i need to. Encrypted data can be hidden in plain site as noise in an mp3 file or the difference between planes of a graphic. Since criminals don't go to CrockUSA and buy the software they use to skulk about with, there would be no way to even know what they were using.
So we have useless encryption that isn't used, a huge instaled base of tough encrypters we can't stop and a group of people who our law doesn't affect. Why are we even arguing this? It's as stupid as, I dunno, declaring war against an enemy that doesn't exist yet or vowing revenge on a religion and people who had nothing to do anything. Sometimes the fucking reactionary know-nothings in this country make me wish I was in Canada, where nobody knows anything either but at least they don't have strong opinions about it.
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Comics that aren't funny delivered directly to my door in book form that is vastly inferior to the form I get free online?
Can it get any better than this???
Oh, ID ten T. Funny. Yes, it is good to insult those who have not specialized their intelligence in the same areas as us. I do so enjoy it when my dental hygenist laughs at me and rolls her eyes when I don't floss.
The test drive runs HORRIDLY on my g3 500 (it's an expensive laptop i haven't paid off yet, so i'm not getting a new one for a few years), so slow that the AD&D 2nd Edition Character Generator is unusable, while the original runs great under 9.2.1. I'm really bummed to hear that EVERYBODY isn't in the same boat as me.
Nice screenshot...love the Audion skin, i use that one meself.
HTML for all text? 3d built into the subsystem? Virtual Machines and OODMBS?
Sounds to me like a beefy version of Java3d, which while not an OS, I've always thought should be the basis for one. Who doesn't want a natively multi threaded high security OS with the "metal" LaF and true object oriented design? Plus, by devoting all system reources to the VM, we might actually get Java that could respond on an older system...
I write in Java using a text editor and I haven't written to my registry in months.
In fact, when I first got here my system was locked down like a prisoner by accident (they thought I was an intern...god I hate being young) and I didn't notice for four months, and then only because I installed JDK 1.3.1 (which wanted to change my JavaPath).
Yes, Java CAN interface with the registry, but it's a heck of a lot easier to use object dumps and ini files (in xml of course). And since things don't need to be "registered" (more trouble than it's worth) due to the namespace and classpath, you end up with a very nice sandbox development environment.
I wish this effing COM object I've been trying to teach how to use the network all morning were written in java...
Wow. Poster must be wholly unable to think different. No HD because it (if it exists) is a PDA and needs a low power solution. No NIC because it (again, if it exists) has airport and doesn't need wires. MacOSX has no NIC and I mount NFS.
Get your head out of your 486 and welcome to the 21st century. And if you want a portable UNIX machine, buy a small PC.
Yeah, marketeers of the industry. No substance to any of their products. There was no substance at all in the first card expandable desktop PC (Apple 2), the first portable pc, the first windowing laptop, the first internet appliance, the first PDA, the first machine with Firewire, the first PC that could burn DVDs or in the first computer with a 16x9 aspect ratio.
You PC enthusiasts sure come up with a lot of useful ideas. Subscription operating systems? Pop up ads for "free" internet? You guys are fucking geniuses
Developers all over -- the sort that don't have web pages because they're too busy debugging -- oppose open source. I'm one of them, to a degree, and our entire staff here is much more fanatical than I.
It has far less to do with moral issues or "what OS is better" -- many of these guys work on or with open source code fairly often. I run Cobalt Linux on my development webserver because that's what it came with and the logisitics of installing Sco or BSD over an rlogin is frightening. But I'm uneasy about it.
Why? Because in many ways it threatens our jobs! The problem with true open source programming when you're a lifetime developer for a large solution provider is that it suddenly becomes less feasible to develop custom solutions than to pay exorbitant licenses. A lot of the applications I've developed have been very similar to tasks you could probably perform in Access or Excel -- were it not for the cost of deployment of these packages. These apps were written from the ground up, they are very specialized niche pieces which are perfectly matched to what our workers have to do. Now, consider what would happens when an open office solution comes along and does something similar to what Access does. Suddenly, you don't need a programmer to build your application, all you need is a scripter. A scripter is much cheaper, and I get my walking papers.
Now a lot of you might chime in about how I'm technically doing too much work, or how I can transition to a "support" role (find a supporter who makes six digits and you'll have found a man with a silver tongue) or how the elimination of senior programmers is in someway good for the company. But the solutions I provide are easy to support because they only operate in one way, they're easier to learn for our customers and the code is well known by everybody here because we developed them part and parcel. The initial cost of open source seems low, but the support cost of pouring over lines of code written by god knows who using god knows what style to find some bug that may or may not be known and then fixing and releasing the fix legally under the license of the code is much higher -- rather than employ one programmer for a few hours to fix a bug he knows about, you're faced with either hiring a consultant at exorbitant rates to fix the bug or a scripter for a couple days to research, fix and release the patch.
I like getting free software, but promoting open source is something that is very delicate in our industry. It's harder and more expensive to support, extend (with exceptions, apache is much easier to modify than IIS, but in my experience that's very rare among open source projects) and deploy than homebrewed software, and often has no associated costs to use yet it purports to be "free as in speech not as in beer." It's really hard to get people to pay for steak when you're giving them hamburgers for free!
I just love hacking around in my cassiopeia. Not only is it nice and small so it can be played with wherever, but it has an easy to use ide (embedded visual studio) and a serial port just waiting to be hacked. I've convered it into a mini code reader and have been working on writing software to make the unit act as an oscilloscope.
The price? Well...a new one's going to run you about 500$, but we don't need a new one...we need something we can conscientiously hack. Mine was a refurb developer's model which cost my lovely mother $200 with a 90 day warranty direct from casio.com.
WHAT? Electrical Engineers are the worst type of computer nerd, what with their pripensity for tinkering with sickly 8088 processors in labs and using software that predates keyboards. As we said in college, you can't even spell geek without E.E.
Well, despite five years of studies in rhetorical science I can still spell "fuck off."
Asking people to use another language when dealing with machines -- especially one that's more visceral -- is just asking for trouble. Already computers are seriously affecting the ability of humans to communicate orally, by concentrating the language into short bursts used during chats we lose the particles of sentences that help establish context in speech (yes, there is a reason for "the" and "a"). Besides, here's an oppurtunity to elleviate a lot of the bad habits that make dialectic English so tough to understand for those outside the dialect: set the machines to understand one sort of English, so that everybody has to speak at least that type along with their colloquial speech. Of course, there's always the possibility for eugenic practices with this, so my proposal is this: teach the computer the differences between the 8 vowel sounds used by people in Colorado, where pretty much every vowel approaches the schwa (the schwa being the neutral position for the human vocal system and therefore easiest to pronounce). After a while, people will realise that to be successful at using voice activated systems, they'll need to adjust their inflection, and after a while will adjust it automatically when dealing with people who don't understand them, either.
But voice activated systems are stupid, anyway...speech is one of the slowest forms of human interaction, and is one of the few we have to actively concentrate on to perform. You know when people say, "Think before you speak?" That's because once you start speaking a large portion of your brain activity is devoted to doing so...it actually becomes harder to think about what to say next. Pressing a button or turning a dial takes practically no thought...which is another reason why a speech written in spontaneous draft still sounds better than one that is spoken aloud. If we convert machines to speach recognition, we're effectively asking people to interact with them in dumber ways. And can you imagine the logic involved with processing a fairly simple statement like "This check in my hand should be processed by you and in return i'd like fifty bucks in tens and ten one dollar bills." Since the command isn't linear, the machine not only has to recognize what each word means, but try and interpret them in queue. And if humans can't construct complicated sentences like the one above -- which any human over the age of about 4 can understand, before that kids can't identify the subject and object in complex sentences -- they'll be inconvenienced by speaking machines. Oh and for a simpler example, try this: "My pin number? 376 uhhhhhh...Forty-two thirteen...aaaaaaaaaaaand...is it six? no. Eight?...oh! oh! sixty eight!" A human can understand that...we'd be annoyed, but we'd get it.
It's about fucking time!
MySQL has been mired in the stone ages of Dbase4 for years; these will be welcom additions and will definitely help MySQL overtake some of its lofty closed source competitors.
Me, I'm sticking with PostGreSQL. But I applaud the effort of the developers to make their application into something that DBAs worldwide can feel proud to add to their resumes.
I wonder if the estate of Jonathan Swift can sue both their asses, as Gulliver's Travels came out more than a century before the filming of Reckless Kelly.
Incidentally, great film.
Kelly: "Dog, go get dan. GO GET DAN!"
Dog: "Cornflakes."
Kelly: "Stupid Dog!"
At my university, you are pretty much expected to work in groups, to the point that some professors assign them at the beginning of the semester and all of them warn you of the dangers of stealing. They do this because CS CAN BE TOUGH, especially for some of the non-techs that were in my CS department. We got a lot of students who were aiming for careers in consulting, IT or MIS and needed a degree but not necessarily the knowledge. Knowing this, most professors expect you to work in groups, where you can design alogirthms and modules together but present different finished projects. After all, five students debugging a stack is a lot more efficient than each doing it alone. Furthurmore, since our school gets mainly foreign graduate students as TAs, who are often hard to understand or who don't have any formal teaching instruction, we often get together in groups where students help each other understand difficult concepts -- the notes from these sessions generates code that may seem stolen.
However, I hated working in groups, mostly because I ended up doing all the work. It seems to me that this sort of groupwork encourages slacking -- certainly, I had a number of logic design labs where I did all the work while my partner tried to score with the engineering babes. As a defence mechanism, I developed a series of coding styles that mildly obfuscated my code in such a way that cheaters who didn't really reengineer it before submission would be handily caught...namely, I began developing a style which involved a lot of recursion, some unusual object style modularity (a lot of inlining, a trick most students don't use for clarity's sake) and so forth. I also made sure to hand in all the labs slightly ahead of anybody who i was "helping." My professors (I have one in mind, an adjunct who worked at IBM during the day) usually caught on pretty quick that I knew what I was doing and that if other people submitted code that looked similar to mine it was probably a result of group debugging and not copying or cheating. In any event, the key is to DO your own work even when working in a group...to understand modules you use even if they're written by other people. Otherwise, you'll not have the knowledge necesary to transcend the next level -- which is why so many people who pass our CS 240 (data structures) fail out when they hit CS 340 (OOP -- built on the concepts of 240).
Update: we do not need anybody to tell us when to feed our cats. When they are hungry, cats have a built in alert mechanism.
Gotta go find the neosporin...
Ok, this is useless. Stephen Wright has a joke about an existential map at a department store that said 'You are Here' all over it, and for our purposes "low resolution" is about the same. 30 meters is a lot...hell, 10 meters is a lot...and i'd much rather rely on my eye and a reference object than a measurement that tells me when I'm in a "zone".
Casio released a WinCE device similar to their e-125 with very similar ruggedness specs (and yes, you COULD hack it to run Pocket Linux. Not that you'd want to). They also released a wireless model and a bunch of other cool stuff that nobody has ever seen, because Casio didn't market ANY of these. They were mostly sold through catalogs for commercial applications and in Japan (BTW, japanese handwriting recognition software has to be seen to be beleived...no crummy "Jot" notation there!)
i on=145&market=0&product=1880
Links to casio: EG 800 Ruggedized PC http://www.casio.com/personalpcs/product.cfm?sect
By the way, I love Casio's name for these devices..."Personal PCs," the connotation that these machines are not mere "assistants," but real PCs that are always handy and could someday replace the desktop (or at least heavily offset it). And as the machines get smaller and more rugged, we get closer to the geek ideal of "wearables" that will run our lives: reminding us to feed our cats, telling us if our outfit matches, and generating fractal pickup lines that work every time.
You know, Microsoft's current policys, coming as they do in a time of belt tightening, are the best thing that has ever happened to me -- as an advocate of Macs and UNIX!
You see, there isn't just one useful GUI OS for PCs...there are a couple dozen, of which two of my favorites are Solaris and Mac OS X. Each of these is more reliable and in some ways faster than windows XP, each is more customizable graphically and each has a full suite of applications that run under them. And there's very low upgrade costs -- OS X's new upgrade costs $20 for a CD which can be used on every installation you can find! Combine this with both systems having painless hardware upgrades that don't require reinstalling the OS, and I find that Microsoft's marketeers are doing my pro-Graphical UNIX preaching for me!
Windows XP: How are you going to pay today?
Acutally, turns out my 10 meters was liberal wishful thinking. Here's the straight poop from Garmin's website and FAQ:
"With the end of Selective Availability, you can expect horizontal accuracy of 20m to 35m (60' to 105') for older 8 channel units and 7m to 15m (21' to 45') for newer 12 parallel channel units in good reception conditions. For altitude you can expect accuracy to range from +/- 75m (225') for an 8 channel unit and +/- 35m (105') for 12 parallel channel units in good reception conditions. There are a number of environmental conditions that can effect GPS accuracy due to varying satellite signal reception conditions and can therefore lead to better or worse accuracy's than listed above. The satellite status page on most GARMIN GPS units will provide a real-time estimate of the relative accuracy of the position reported by the GPS receiver. "
So that's accurate within 7 meters if you have a good GPS (fucking expensive) and something more like 25m if you have a regular one. You call that accurate? When trying to find a three foot wide path in a heavily wooded area, knowing that I have between 49 and 625 square feet between where the device says I am and where I actually am is little comfort. In face, it's more what we in the software industry call "fucking useless."
I'm a proud owner of a Cassiopeia E-100, the first colour handheld ever. It's aging quite nicely -- the processor is only 133 MHz, but that's MIPS and not this cheap-slow-crunches-x86-code-easily StrongARM BS that looks nice on benchmarks but can't feed graphics to save its life. The problem is that the E-100 is stuck in time, there's not really much development going on for Windows CE 2.11 and the developers who used to give us a hand-me-down build when compiling for 3.0 usually just blow us off entirely. Some of the new graphics APIs, which don't really have a parellel in Pocket Linux are very swift and are allowing handhelds to really blow up the market with features like full motion video, great VNC support, and really bitchin' audio interfaces.
What, say those of you still stuck in the dark ages of the "i can do anything a pencil and paper can do, only 500 times more expensive" PalmOS, why would you want motion video? Well, because it's terribly useful for making a lot of the things you want a palmtop for more descriptive. Take, for example, the latest topographical software that comes with TopoUSA (a maptech product I think). It can display a 3d gradient of an area. Not too useful? I beg to differ. There have been a number of times up in the 'dacks where I've bivouaced up a mountain and come down on the totally wrong side. I can't read contour lines for shit, because I don't have a degree in geography. With the isometric view that this topo software provides, i could just input the direction i was facing, and scroll until the terrain matched what I was seeing (no, GPS wouldn't be useful here, because it would be at least ten meters off...and in a land of overgrown trails and thousand foot cliffs, ten meters is a lot). There are lots of other uses for a decent graphics API, too, such as video conferencing and web browsing.
However, this new iPaq still has the same crummy 12 bit downsampled (meaning that the proc takes time to shave off the extra 4 bits) screen as its predessors. So while the processor is faster, the display (which is the biggest bottleneck, pocketpcpassion.com had a benchmark showing that even the E-100 could beat the 32 meg iPaq to the screen using the old graphics APIs) is slow as it ever was. Kind of a shame, considering all the features...like putting a big engine, big gas tank, great stereo, leather seats, GPS and handheld telephone into a nice little lightweight chassis, and then gearing it for torque.
Microsoft would NEVER steal code or concepts without giving credit or licensing the technology...because they know that giant corporations are lawsuit fodder. Here's a couple of lines from the "About" box in IE 5.0:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
Contains SOCKS client software licensed from Hummingbird Communications Ltd.
Contains ASN.1 software licensed from Open Systems Solutions, Inc.
Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
And so on, in plain view, right where it should be. Evil corporation? Maybe. But not so evil that they don't give shout outs to their forefathers. Not that I'm claiming that this little mistake makes RedHat bad or anything -- just that all the anti - windows folks should realize that !Free != !Friendly.
Many of you who view slashdot from a Linux box may never have seen a DVD before, and can obviously live without them since Linux doesn't have any legal DVD software. Some of you may never have seen a "windowing operating system," either (they're great, you don't have to type nearly as much and sometimes you even get pictures). But you need to understand something: when you buy a $2500+ machine, which claims to be, among other things, a DVD player, you had better well be able to play DVDs on it. Now, I got mine for only $400, and I'm fairly proficient at multibooting (my windows PC runs BSD, Be, Win 98 and Windows 2000) so i'm only slightly pissed at OS-X's severe lacking in the DVD department. But many people, for whom the mac is the one machine to rule them all, are goddamn pissed at the lack of DVD support. When you insert a DVD, an icon proclaiming "DVD!" appears on your desktop to mock you. And besides: with the excellent BSD operating system underneath us, maybe Mac users can finally get a little DVD -> MPEG action without begging our linux and windows friends to rip vob files for us.
I've been using OSX for a while, and it is a real dog on any chip other than a G4. It's always been usable, but the windows don't have the snap-into-action feel that they need to satisfy an old Win2k afficianado such as myself. Furthermore, the OS was missing a lot of essential features, DVD being the most prominent, that are coming in full effect. Also exciting is the movement of a couple of important indicators to the empty space on the apple bar...my dock quickly fills up and I can't wait to lose things like the battery indicator that don't really need to be so big. Here's hoping the developers of such great dock apps as LoadInDock, Memory Manager, TempInDock (immeasurably useful, so you don't put a 140 degree lappy onto your legs while wearing shorts) and so on. It seems most of the visibility "enhancements" are just the hidden options in OS 10.4, unlockable via tweak panels...but it'll be nice to have more efficient effects like the scale available from a System Preference.
Ahhh, 10.1...OSX is finally a real operating system. Thank you, blue fairy!
How would an individual in a cashless society buy marijuana, pornography, stolen laptops or big bags of Doritos despite being on a low carb diet? Cash leaves no paper trail, is universally acceptable by people who aren't really a "business" in the IRS-tracks-our-every move sense and has a sort of a global backing. It is the only form of payment accepted in thousands of small shops, bars, clubs, and in many foreign countries, it's the only way to tip a bellhop who nabs you a box of condoms and doesn't tell your wife about the chick you met at Mac World and it's the only way to get out of an expensive speeding ticket without lying to a judge.
In short, a cashless society would be nice for following our finances, but it reduces a lot of our liberties -- mainly, the right to buy things without anybody (especially not our creditors) knowing what they are. Plus, it's so much fun to do that thing where you make Lincoln stand upside down after a couple joints and a brew-dog.
The whole idea of encrypting a message is that there is only one way to open it: with the password/key/pattern that was used to encrypt it. With a backdoor, there becomes two ways to open it: with a password/key/pattern, and a backdoor key. Now, you say, only the guvment has the key. This is true. But who's in the government? People just like you and me, people who are not incorruptable, people who steal evidence and sell confiscated drugs and who take bribes. Which is an interesting thing to think about: if people have the key, then it makes sense that other people will eventually get the key. It's not a physical structure, it's a copyable string of bits that would eventually trickle down until everybody in the world had a key to the encryption, and unlike a physical lock you can't just replace it with a new key. Backdoored encryption would be secure for no more than a few years, then it would be as open after a fashion as pig latin.
This is of course assuming there's one code that opens all or most encrypted files (one ring to rule them all). There's also the possibility that the government will just require you to submit any keys to a private repository, which would of course be hacked by Eaglesoft faster than you can say "ACLU."
And besides, how can you enforce this when 256-1024 bit encryption exists throughout the world already? You can't round up software, hell i can hide a copy of BestCrypt on my machine for future use and then make a dozen copies when i need to. Encrypted data can be hidden in plain site as noise in an mp3 file or the difference between planes of a graphic. Since criminals don't go to CrockUSA and buy the software they use to skulk about with, there would be no way to even know what they were using.
So we have useless encryption that isn't used, a huge instaled base of tough encrypters we can't stop and a group of people who our law doesn't affect. Why are we even arguing this? It's as stupid as, I dunno, declaring war against an enemy that doesn't exist yet or vowing revenge on a religion and people who had nothing to do anything. Sometimes the fucking reactionary know-nothings in this country make me wish I was in Canada, where nobody knows anything either but at least they don't have strong opinions about it.