They mean automatic "push" synchronization, where your phone's calendar and e-mail are updated wirelessly over the cellular network. That's where the Blackberry has the default Treo beat. (Though there is a really nice piece of non-free software called Chatter that can do push e-mail for the Treo 650 with IMAP servers like fastmail).
From the article: "Currently, on our OfficeOnline site, we are seeing over 30,000 searches per week for PDF support. That makes a pretty easy decision"
There's no reason why learning Emacs has to be intimidating, but it's misleading comments like this that make people believe that they don't understand Emacs.
The Emacs manual begins with an encyclopedic glossary of Emacs terms. 17 pages of terms, according to "Print Preview" in Firefox. Afterwards, you get index pages: a list of all the default keys, a list of all the default options (without even a link to a chapter explaining how to tweak an option), a command index (again, no info on how to run a command), a variable index (same deal), and a "concept index" full of links all over the manual. Finally you get to a very abstract section about how to interpret what's on the Screen, but still no information on how to actually use Emacs.
The O'Reilly book begins with "Emacs Basics", an easy-to-follow guide to the beginnings of Emacs. It looks more like the Emacs tutorial in a plain text format.
The Emacs "Manual" is a gigantic man page. It's not a "manual" in the sense that you're supposed to sit down and read it as a first introduction to Emacs. It's not a guide for people to read. It's a reference guide for you to go find information you already knew was there.
I'll admit, the built-in tutorial is a much better introduction, but it leaves you at the novice level. You know how to push the cursor around, but you know *nothing* about how to set options, what a variable is, how to set them, etc. To get from here to there requires hours of reading random info pages to try to find what you're looking for. Nothing like reading a clear manual.
Never recommend that a newbie to Emacs read the Emacs Manual. The Manual is for Intermediate users wishing to become Advanced. The Tutorial is for novices. For those wishing to get to the Intermediate level, this O'Reilly book isn't a half bad choice.
I bought a PS2 only because there was a particular PlayStation game (DDR) that I just had to have, and figured I'd probably want some of those upcoming PS2 games as well, so I splurged.
You can bet that if the PS2 didn't support backwards compatibility, I never would have bought it.
Also, as a long-time reader of/., I'd prefer to keep the joke stories confined to Apr 1st.
Wow, what a stick-in-the-mud.
In that case, I'm sure you already know how to turn off joke stories, just by editing your preferences and checking the "It's funny. Laugh." checkbox.
But since you know that, why would you bother posting and complaining about them? Could it be that your love for complaining is even greater than your distaste for joke stories...?
Well, yeah, but what's missing exactly? The shire in book 6? Or Gandalf's confrontation with Saruman and Grima? It sounds like the latter (since Brad Dourif now won't have any reason to go to the premiere either...?)
The final Gandalf/Saruman confrontation is extremely important, and cuts the character off at the knees, IMO, without giving him a proper send-off.
It will no doubt be a big deal for VoIP. Why? Because it means that all you have to do in order to associate your IP address with a phone number is to register your phone number with DNS. That's certainly a nice-to-have.
But when they suggest that we could use this to somehow ease the pain of using a PDA/number-pad as a UI to the Internet (read: WWW), and therefore bring about the holy grail of Convergence, that's when my bozometer redlines. OK, so that phone number translates to a DNS name, which in turn resolves to an IP address which, say, takes me to a website. Now what? I still have to login!
Maybe the plan was that I'd make up a special phone number for myself that would map to a special IP address that would redirect me to an URL that would post my login information for me. But why would I ever want to do that? Have they completely forgotten that logins are a security measure, not just an inconvenience to be circumvented via shortcuts?
Don't get me wrong; it's nice that we can make it easier to enter canonical URLs using a numeric keypad. I appreciate that. But let's not get too excited about this. As a UI enhancement, ENUM a trivial, evolutionary step forward. It isn't, and won't ever be, a "really big deal."
If you, like me, didn't know much about generics, the best place to go to read up more is the specification off of which JSR 14 was based: GJ: Generic Java. Don't bother with the FAQ though... it seems to be mostly empty.
(Excuse my whoring, but Sun's link to GJ was 404.)
Update Rootless to "006ify it" (update it to use/S/L/Shared), and make the Scripts package fully-Rootless-compatible again.
Really?/S/L/Shared? Maybe we should make a symlink to that... Perhaps even a whole network of symlinks, with short, convenient names: lower-case, easy-to-type, and easy to remember!;)
[Disclaimer: You can mod me down, but I really do like this idea... if only it didn't break all of the existing binary packages ever written.;)]
Please tell me this is just gibberish, or I will be forced to write a shell script that maps Dvorak chars to Qwerty chars. It's gibberish, right? Please, God, let it be gibberish!!
Nope. It's Dvorak, alright. It's nothing exciting. It just says:
which method I'm typing on and I forget to look at the monitor for a while.
As others have commented, the story submitter provided no links to the offending document; no evidence that Lelyveld has written anything despicable to the FCC.
Interestingly, Google has (as of yet) no mention of the phrase "where we are all artist/waiters."
Are we supposed to believe that the story submitter a whistleblower of some kind? Or what?
Uhm, not quite. That's how long it will take before our machines are 256 times faster, which is a very different question. (It would be tempting to just multiply this number by 4, the number of years it took to solve RC-64, but that would merely tell us how long it would take the computers of 2014 to solve RC-72 [answer: 48 years].)
You need a more nuanced answer that takes into account your exponential progress as you're ramping up to full speed.
Let C be the Moore doubling time. Let P be the number of computations required to solve RC-64. Let X be the instantaneous speed at which you can solve problems, in units of P/year. So for t = 4
OK, so I agree with everyone else that the anti-leech folks are lame. But there was one good point to be raised in that FAQ... waaaay down at the end.
You are the thief! You steal my screen by poping up pop ups
If you don't like pop ups, then use a pop up blocker! But then you are not welcome to Anti-Theft protected websites as you are not ready to give something in return.
You know what? I'm perfectly fine with this attitude. So long as I'm free to block pop-ups, I know they're free to block me. I don't think it's wise, mind you, but with Voltaire, I'll defend to the death their right to do it.
Yes, it's yet another entry in a long line of 'Ask Slashdot' articles that should have been entitled 'Ask My Paid Legal Counsel'.
It's really quite simple: you have complicated legal requirements. Therefore, you require a well-paid lawyer who understands the legal implications of what you're requesting, to write up a detailed unambiguous contract.
/. will give you a bunch of one-liner responses and general advice, but that's about all we can do for you. We Are Not A Lawyer.
Actually, there is a real use for widespread heavy-duty crypto, even on a PDA: encrypted money tokens.
If strong encrypted money tokens were to be implemented on a wide scale for, say, Palm PocketPC, Zaurus, and maybe a special purpose StrongARM device, you could expect to see a cheap widespread secure electronic payment mechanism that you can use for micropayments.
Aside from the novelty of buying lunch with your PDA, this could be the next step towards truly secure electronic transfers. You can say goodbye to corporate privacy violations when you can pay for your online goods with secure anonymous electronic cash.
Imagine paying your peers in a P2P system for MP3s/OGGs/whatever. Providing fat bandwidth for P2P would be a potential money-maker, not merely a labor of love. Throw in an anonymizing protocol and you're selling MP3 bandwidth online securely and untraceably; the RIAA couldn't shut you down, because there'd be no way to figure out who you were.
That's the power of widespread strong crypto, especially in small devices.
> > IP Lawyer...
> Sheesh, enough with the lawyer bashing already.
Speaking as somebody who's decided not to become an IP lawyer precisely *because* this profession is of dubious ethical value, I'd like to point out that you've missed the point entirely.
Being a lawyer isn't, in itself, morally dubious. But defending copyrights and patents under current US law IS of questionable moral value. (Never call it "intellectual property", as that term confuses the issues.)
I double majored in Biomedical Engineering and Philosophy in college, but no matter how "hot" the job might be, you couldn't give me enough money to do what I'd have to do as a patent lawyer in my field. I'd have to try to prevent companies from offering cheap alternatives that the poor could afford. I'd have to prevent research on the grounds that licensing fees weren't paid. I'd have to attack companies as part of a business model in which extortionary patents are the main sources of income.
If I worked as a "copyright" lawyer, just to get paid as much as I get paid as an engineer right now, I'd have to argue that my rich clients deserve money from anyone who challenges the powers they bought from Congress; I'd have to try to move more money into their hands because Republicans can't understand the difference between Communism and the public domain and because Democrats are watching out for their good friends and patrons in Hollywood.
As this kind of lawyer, I would never *make* money; I would only move money from one person to another.
I'm open-minded enough to see that there are clear arguments against my views, mostly grounded in the semantics of "incentives." Some of those arguments may be right. But I think it'd take a closed-minded and exceptionally blinkered point of view to fail to see that being an "IP lawyer" is, indeed, of dubious ethical value.
It's interesting to note that the most relevant precedent brought to bear on Ellison's case against AOL was a case in which the Scientologists (through the Religious Technology Center, one of their many dummy organizations,) tried to sue Netcom On-Line Communications Services, Inc. for storing their copyrighted religious texts on USENET.
In that case, the court said this: "The court does not find workable a theory of direct infringement that would hold the entire Internet liable for actions that cannot reasonably be deterred." The worst possible outcome from a Scientologist's perspective.
Judge Cooper upheld this precedent with her current summary judgement. Way cool.
Slashdot Mirror
They mean automatic "push" synchronization, where your phone's calendar and e-mail are updated wirelessly over the cellular network. That's where the Blackberry has the default Treo beat. (Though there is a really nice piece of non-free software called Chatter that can do push e-mail for the Treo 650 with IMAP servers like fastmail).
So, how's about you, me, and a few thousands of our friends search for OpenDocument support?
As I said during the beta, the New SlashCode is illegible on a Treo 650.
There's no reason why learning Emacs has to be intimidating, but it's misleading comments like this that make people believe that they don't understand Emacs.
Do us all a favor and compare the Emacs Manual Table of Contents with the Learning GNU Emacs Table of Contents.
The Emacs manual begins with an encyclopedic glossary of Emacs terms. 17 pages of terms, according to "Print Preview" in Firefox. Afterwards, you get index pages: a list of all the default keys, a list of all the default options (without even a link to a chapter explaining how to tweak an option), a command index (again, no info on how to run a command), a variable index (same deal), and a "concept index" full of links all over the manual. Finally you get to a very abstract section about how to interpret what's on the Screen, but still no information on how to actually use Emacs.
The O'Reilly book begins with "Emacs Basics", an easy-to-follow guide to the beginnings of Emacs. It looks more like the Emacs tutorial in a plain text format.
The Emacs "Manual" is a gigantic man page. It's not a "manual" in the sense that you're supposed to sit down and read it as a first introduction to Emacs. It's not a guide for people to read. It's a reference guide for you to go find information you already knew was there.
I'll admit, the built-in tutorial is a much better introduction, but it leaves you at the novice level. You know how to push the cursor around, but you know *nothing* about how to set options, what a variable is, how to set them, etc. To get from here to there requires hours of reading random info pages to try to find what you're looking for. Nothing like reading a clear manual.
Never recommend that a newbie to Emacs read the Emacs Manual. The Manual is for Intermediate users wishing to become Advanced. The Tutorial is for novices. For those wishing to get to the Intermediate level, this O'Reilly book isn't a half bad choice.
I bet it's probably illegible on other handheld devices as well... try it on yours!
No villians?
Have you forgotten the part where Roy (Rutger Hauer) kills Tyrell in cold blood, and then strips down to his diapers and hunts Deckard for sport?
I bought a PS2 only because there was a particular PlayStation game (DDR) that I just had to have, and figured I'd probably want some of those upcoming PS2 games as well, so I splurged.
You can bet that if the PS2 didn't support backwards compatibility, I never would have bought it.
Also, as a long-time reader of /., I'd prefer to keep the joke stories confined to Apr 1st.
Wow, what a stick-in-the-mud.
In that case, I'm sure you already know how to turn off joke stories, just by editing your preferences and checking the "It's funny. Laugh." checkbox.
But since you know that, why would you bother posting and complaining about them? Could it be that your love for complaining is even greater than your distaste for joke stories...?
Well, yeah, but what's missing exactly? The shire in book 6? Or Gandalf's confrontation with Saruman and Grima? It sounds like the latter (since Brad Dourif now won't have any reason to go to the premiere either...?)
The final Gandalf/Saruman confrontation is extremely important, and cuts the character off at the knees, IMO, without giving him a proper send-off.
It will no doubt be a big deal for VoIP. Why? Because it means that all you have to do in order to associate your IP address with a phone number is to register your phone number with DNS. That's certainly a nice-to-have.
But when they suggest that we could use this to somehow ease the pain of using a PDA/number-pad as a UI to the Internet (read: WWW), and therefore bring about the holy grail of Convergence, that's when my bozometer redlines. OK, so that phone number translates to a DNS name, which in turn resolves to an IP address which, say, takes me to a website. Now what? I still have to login!
Maybe the plan was that I'd make up a special phone number for myself that would map to a special IP address that would redirect me to an URL that would post my login information for me. But why would I ever want to do that? Have they completely forgotten that logins are a security measure, not just an inconvenience to be circumvented via shortcuts?
Don't get me wrong; it's nice that we can make it easier to enter canonical URLs using a numeric keypad. I appreciate that. But let's not get too excited about this. As a UI enhancement, ENUM a trivial, evolutionary step forward. It isn't, and won't ever be, a "really big deal."
-Dan
I run Darwin for x86, you insensitive clod!
Oh, wait. Is... is this a poll? Excuse me.
(Excuse my whoring, but Sun's link to GJ was 404.)
Really? /S/L/Shared? Maybe we should make a symlink to that... Perhaps even a whole network of symlinks, with short, convenient names: lower-case, easy-to-type, and easy to remember! ;)
[Disclaimer: You can mod me down, but I really do like this idea... if only it didn't break all of the existing binary packages ever written. ;)]
-Dan
We prefer to refer to him as the Daemon, thank you very much! ;)
-Dan
Please tell me this is just gibberish, or I will be forced to write a shell script that maps Dvorak chars to Qwerty chars. It's gibberish, right? Please, God, let it be gibberish!!
Nope. It's Dvorak, alright. It's nothing exciting. It just says:
which method I'm typing on and I forget to look at the monitor for a while.
Hslqk ysoudk ks hoglv tsfo S.apkgld! z)
Interestingly, Google has (as of yet) no mention of the phrase "where we are all artist/waiters."
Are we supposed to believe that the story submitter a whistleblower of some kind? Or what?
Well, this thread is probably lost to the sands of time, but yes, you're right. Shucks.
(t/1.5) = log_2 (256) = 8
t = 8 * 1.5 = 12.
Uhm, not quite. That's how long it will take before our machines are 256 times faster, which is a very different question. (It would be tempting to just multiply this number by 4, the number of years it took to solve RC-64, but that would merely tell us how long it would take the computers of 2014 to solve RC-72 [answer: 48 years].)
You need a more nuanced answer that takes into account your exponential progress as you're ramping up to full speed.
Let C be the Moore doubling time. Let P be the number of computations required to solve RC-64. Let X be the instantaneous speed at which you can solve problems, in units of P/year. So for t = 4
1/2 x/C t^2 = 1
so x = (C/8 years) P/year
Given that, we can calculate t in this equation:
1/16years^2 t^2 = 256
t^2 = 4096 years^2
t = 64 years
If only they'd do the same for me...
It's really quite simple: you have complicated legal requirements. Therefore, you require a well-paid lawyer who understands the legal implications of what you're requesting, to write up a detailed unambiguous contract.
If strong encrypted money tokens were to be implemented on a wide scale for, say, Palm PocketPC, Zaurus, and maybe a special purpose StrongARM device, you could expect to see a cheap widespread secure electronic payment mechanism that you can use for micropayments.
Aside from the novelty of buying lunch with your PDA, this could be the next step towards truly secure electronic transfers. You can say goodbye to corporate privacy violations when you can pay for your online goods with secure anonymous electronic cash.
Imagine paying your peers in a P2P system for MP3s/OGGs/whatever. Providing fat bandwidth for P2P would be a potential money-maker, not merely a labor of love. Throw in an anonymizing protocol and you're selling MP3 bandwidth online securely and untraceably; the RIAA couldn't shut you down, because there'd be no way to figure out who you were.
That's the power of widespread strong crypto, especially in small devices.
I'd be willing to pay $100 towards the cause.
> > IP Lawyer...
> Sheesh, enough with the lawyer bashing already.
Speaking as somebody who's decided not to become an IP lawyer precisely *because* this profession is of dubious ethical value, I'd like to point out that you've missed the point entirely.
Being a lawyer isn't, in itself, morally dubious. But defending copyrights and patents under current US law IS of questionable moral value. (Never call it "intellectual property", as that term confuses the issues.)
I double majored in Biomedical Engineering and Philosophy in college, but no matter how "hot" the job might be, you couldn't give me enough money to do what I'd have to do as a patent lawyer in my field. I'd have to try to prevent companies from offering cheap alternatives that the poor could afford. I'd have to prevent research on the grounds that licensing fees weren't paid. I'd have to attack companies as part of a business model in which extortionary patents are the main sources of income.
If I worked as a "copyright" lawyer, just to get paid as much as I get paid as an engineer right now, I'd have to argue that my rich clients deserve money from anyone who challenges the powers they bought from Congress; I'd have to try to move more money into their hands because Republicans can't understand the difference between Communism and the public domain and because Democrats are watching out for their good friends and patrons in Hollywood.
As this kind of lawyer, I would never *make* money; I would only move money from one person to another.
I'm open-minded enough to see that there are clear arguments against my views, mostly grounded in the semantics of "incentives." Some of those arguments may be right. But I think it'd take a closed-minded and exceptionally blinkered point of view to fail to see that being an "IP lawyer" is, indeed, of dubious ethical value.
In that case, the court said this: "The court does not find workable a theory of direct infringement that would hold the entire Internet liable for actions that cannot reasonably be deterred." The worst possible outcome from a Scientologist's perspective.
Judge Cooper upheld this precedent with her current summary judgement. Way cool.
Yet again, the Scientologists shoot themselves in the foot!
I'm one of the moderators for Cloudmakers. Those looking to get involved should definitely start at the Cloudmakers home page.
We're always looking for new players to jump on board, so read the FAQ and subscribe!
<humor>Oh, and buy CM T-shirts too!