Long ago, an early Mac ad compared itself to the IBM PC by dropping the corresponding manuals next to each machine. The Mac manual was light as a feather, the PC manual pile was 2 feet high. It was of course an exaggeration, but the point was valid.
I don't see how Apple can afford to not take advantage of the current spyware/security craziness occurring in the Windows world, and put out a ballsy ad along the same lines. Perhaps show each computer out of the box being plugged into a broadband connection, and on the Windows box, instantly a dozen windows pop up advertising things. Something along those lines.
I use both Macs and Windows all the time. My mom has a Mac, because I don't have time for the "family tech support" that her having a PC would require. She does complain about occasional problems with the Mac, but I have no doubt it would be at least 3 times as bad if she was running Windows.
Exercise: Given a compressed encrypted datastream, try to determine through analysis that it is not in fact highly random background noise. Assumption: Far-foreigners do not communicate in decompressed cleartext, since bandwidth is probably finite everywhere. Or they did at first (like us), but quickly (like us) discovered the advantage of scrunching and obfuscating digitized data. Conclusion: You are better off spending your cpu time on the Folding@Home project than the SETI radiotelescope data analysis project.
I would, of course, love it if someone gave me a plausible reason why the SETI project has a snowball's chance in hell of finding anything.
because PlayFair already cracked it and will allow us to unlock what we've purchased. The main site's taken down, but you can just google "playfair-0.5.0" or the like.
Or just burn to CD and re-encode, but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that?
There are also already plugins for Winamp that will play both.m4a as well as.m4p files (as long as you have iTunes installed)
The key to not getting bumped as a tech wage slave by outsourced labor is to not just learn a TECHNOLOGY, but learn a BUSINESS alongside it. Then your value will lie in the combination of business knowledge and tech know-how that you have. The kind of work value that this results in is not nearly so easily exported.
Oh, but wait... I never needed corrective lenses nor this surgery;)
Actually, I do have something semi-related to contribute... I read a while back that there is a strong correlation between "blue collar worker/great vision" and "white collar worker-academic-technical/poor vision". Even though I am thoroughly a geek, my dad was actually the first pencil-pusher in his family, as well as my mom. So that may explain my excellent vision (which I probably take for granted). Meanwhile, children of the "neurons" of society tend to have poorer vision.
I'm actually thinking more along the lines of, if our entire history was overshadowed by the achievements of our "forebear" civilization, and all our knowledge was handed down to us... what that would do to our collective ego in a long-term, "contributing something meaningful, unique and significant to the rest of the universe" sense.
Look at the families out there where a younger brother has forever lived within the shadow of the achievements of an older sibling, and in failing to attain equivalent recognition, has fallen into self-debasement.
It may be tough to be proud of ourselves if we know we're not first. And in having our pride robbed from us, it might damage our potential.
...left to evolve alone for a while due to some as-yet-misunderstood need for uniqueness, civilization ego development, "learning everything the hard way" or some such end.
Imagine what it would have done to the "worldwide ego" if our entire history was simply a footnote within the shadow of some much greater collection of civilizations that we are actually a part of. Imagine that instead of society learning all the collective lessons it has in the past few thousand years, it was all taught to us via some high-tech method.
Perhaps we have actually been colonized, but then left alone to evolve for some reason. Until some point in the future.
In any event, I think Seti@home is ridiculous because surely, future communication is data-compressed and the best compression methods produce data that cannot easily be distinguished from random space background noise.
Suppose we were colonized by some brotherly (fatherly?) entity (such as via living cell deposits in the fresh ocean, which were somehow known would evolve into more complex organisms in this environment) and we are simply temporarily ignorant of our relation to "the rest of our civilization" because there is something significant about "growing up unique and without outside interference", but that at some point in the future "the news will be broken to us", along the lines of a child one day being "old enough" to learn about sex from the "elders", even though the sexual potential was actually there all along? Along those same lines, perhaps it is possible for a civilization to learn of such a relationship "prematurely".
Wow, not only are you spouting falsities (nobody controls AAC, dude, and iTunes for Mac/Windows is a perfect way to manage the music on the thing), I really think you'd buy one if you could afford it, so you're just whining and rationalizing. Just continue to whine and don't ever get your hands on one, since you WILL want it.
You sound like the married guy with the hot flirty secretary who keeps telling himself 5 exaggerated things wrong about her every day in order to stay minimally tempted.
A great short story written by Asimov and not set in the Robot universe is "The Last Question". If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend it. Good geek stuff.
Perhaps because I'm anal, and a Slashdot reader, and a Mac user, but...
If the signal-to-noise ratio of something increases, then what you're saying is that the signal is increasing relative to the noise, while your post (which I like otherwise) seems to indicate you intended otherwise.;) That is, unless I am wrong about "thing1 to thing2" corresponding to "numerator to denominator"...
This is actually doable, it's just convoluted and requires a browser-detect. I did this at a client last year. Google "alphaimageloader png internet explorer" for info.
I config'd a pretty much maxed-out Shuttle PC (G4 8500, compact enclosure, maxed-out Athlon, etc.) for almost the same specs at $3,389, and that's WITH a 19" Samsung LCD display! They're definitely burying a handsome percentage of profit in all the options...
If every one of these voting machines printed out a line on some old dot-matrix printer in another room the instant every vote was cast, a technical difficulty would be a minor inconvenience instead of the catastrophe it is now, due to the audit trail. Cringely hints as much in this column: No Confidence Vote:
Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable
I hope Slashcode doesn't munge this... It's got configurable stuff. Just save locally to an html file and fire up in your open-source web browser of choice. Enjoy.
var insymbols="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
var outsymbols="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" + "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" + "1234567890" + "!?.:@#$%^&*-+=";
var cols=4;//number of output columns
var dict=new Object;//hash lookup dictionary
var dictTable="";//hash table
I work on a web app (one that I didn't design, but that I customize) that stores an md5 hash of the password in the db. And I noticed that you can still glean information from the hash, if the password is common (such as the word "password"). So my idea was to store a hash of the concatenation of the username AND password, ensuring with a high probability that no two hashes will be alike.
My understanding is that not only will the *net* energy output not be very significant, if at all (yet!), the reaction won't be expected to be sustained for more than a few minutes, even at this new facility. All these figures here are *gross* values- I haven't seen any *net* energy figures yet.
That said, this is the stuff that sci-fi dreams are made of. Maybe now that less geeks are going for CS degrees, they'll take some hard-science classes- that stuff is still sorely needed. As well as cool.
I was once a physics major who couldn't cut it because of a lack of discipline to be able to master the difficulties of engineering calculus. Props.;)
I'm surprised that the issue of the lack of encrypted communication in this case hasn't been brought up. Pretty much limits law enforcement into only catching the more idiotic cleartext perverts. Begs the question of gov't access to encrypted communications. I wonder how many privacy-loving Slashdotters would flip on this issue if they had young children. Teenage girls spend hours chatting online these days...
1) Diatribe about Microsoft product 2) Suggestion to use an open-source browser 3) Aside about the benefits of an underdog OS 4)...Self-deprecating humorous reply to one's own post... 5) RECURSIVE karma profit!
1) run any security updates 2) strongly suggest not using Outlook 3) Completely lock down the "Internet" security zone in IE and force users to add sites that don't function properly (due to scripting turned off) to "Trusted Sites" (which has scripting on) 4) Strongly suggest that users use Firefox instead of IE wherever possible 5) Install antivirus software 6) Install Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware
This keeps most spyware, virii and worms out.
As a curious side-note, the first thing I do with a new OS X install is... 1) Apply security patches 2) There is no Step 2;)
I was unemployed and living in CT for 6 months (jun-december). I had put my resume info on Monster and well more than half of the responses were coming from the Boston area. I also had a girlfriend in Boston, and one day, I got an offer from a very big consulting firm there. I took the hint, packed up and moved a month and a half ago;)
To this day my Monster profile (now anonymized) gets at least 1 response a day, and all I am is a wimpy ASP/DHTML/SQL Server developer;)
There IS work out there, if you're in the right place at the right time.
I've had this discussion around the water cooler, and with friends, lots of times. If my IT job is very male-dominated, where are all the ladies at? From this, I got some advice.
Find a friend who is dating someone in a service industry, or in nursing, or in publishing, or in marketing. Then, try to meet as many of that woman's friends as you can. I have gotten lots of dates this way. My current g/f is the classic funny, intelligent, "hottie marketing chick"... very geek-compatible (thank goodness). she doesn't program, but she can google with the best of 'em;)
Office romances are, of course, not recommended anyway, so you're actually way better off this way if you go the friends-of-friends route. Just requires a bit of social investment and tearing yourself away from UT2004 or bash scripting for a bit...;) (i know it's hard! i still play one of the nerdiest games ever, Angband... which my g/f affectionately calls "gangbang" as in "Stop playing gangbang!!")
This is slightly off-topic, but is there a way yet to cache a compiled version of a PHP page (e.g., ASP+ or ASP.NET) so that repeated page views of unaltered code aren't wastefully re-interpreted over and over?
Slashdot Mirror
Long ago, an early Mac ad compared itself to the IBM PC by dropping the corresponding manuals next to each machine. The Mac manual was light as a feather, the PC manual pile was 2 feet high. It was of course an exaggeration, but the point was valid.
I don't see how Apple can afford to not take advantage of the current spyware/security craziness occurring in the Windows world, and put out a ballsy ad along the same lines. Perhaps show each computer out of the box being plugged into a broadband connection, and on the Windows box, instantly a dozen windows pop up advertising things. Something along those lines.
I use both Macs and Windows all the time. My mom has a Mac, because I don't have time for the "family tech support" that her having a PC would require. She does complain about occasional problems with the Mac, but I have no doubt it would be at least 3 times as bad if she was running Windows.
Exercise: Given a compressed encrypted datastream, try to determine through analysis that it is not in fact highly random background noise.
Assumption: Far-foreigners do not communicate in decompressed cleartext, since bandwidth is probably finite everywhere. Or they did at first (like us), but quickly (like us) discovered the advantage of scrunching and obfuscating digitized data.
Conclusion: You are better off spending your cpu time on the Folding@Home project than the SETI radiotelescope data analysis project.
I would, of course, love it if someone gave me a plausible reason why the SETI project has a snowball's chance in hell of finding anything.
because PlayFair already cracked it and will allow us to unlock what we've purchased. The main site's taken down, but you can just google "playfair-0.5.0" or the like.
.m4a as well as .m4p files (as long as you have iTunes installed)
Or just burn to CD and re-encode, but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that?
There are also already plugins for Winamp that will play both
The key to not getting bumped as a tech wage slave by outsourced labor is to not just learn a TECHNOLOGY, but learn a BUSINESS alongside it. Then your value will lie in the combination of business knowledge and tech know-how that you have. The kind of work value that this results in is not nearly so easily exported.
Oh, but wait... I never needed corrective lenses nor this surgery ;)
Actually, I do have something semi-related to contribute... I read a while back that there is a strong correlation between "blue collar worker/great vision" and "white collar worker-academic-technical/poor vision". Even though I am thoroughly a geek, my dad was actually the first pencil-pusher in his family, as well as my mom. So that may explain my excellent vision (which I probably take for granted). Meanwhile, children of the "neurons" of society tend to have poorer vision.
I'm actually thinking more along the lines of, if our entire history was overshadowed by the achievements of our "forebear" civilization, and all our knowledge was handed down to us... what that would do to our collective ego in a long-term, "contributing something meaningful, unique and significant to the rest of the universe" sense.
;)
Look at the families out there where a younger brother has forever lived within the shadow of the achievements of an older sibling, and in failing to attain equivalent recognition, has fallen into self-debasement.
It may be tough to be proud of ourselves if we know we're not first. And in having our pride robbed from us, it might damage our potential.
Not something out of one of Tim Lahaye's books
...left to evolve alone for a while due to some as-yet-misunderstood need for uniqueness, civilization ego development, "learning everything the hard way" or some such end.
Imagine what it would have done to the "worldwide ego" if our entire history was simply a footnote within the shadow of some much greater collection of civilizations that we are actually a part of. Imagine that instead of society learning all the collective lessons it has in the past few thousand years, it was all taught to us via some high-tech method.
Perhaps we have actually been colonized, but then left alone to evolve for some reason. Until some point in the future.
In any event, I think Seti@home is ridiculous because surely, future communication is data-compressed and the best compression methods produce data that cannot easily be distinguished from random space background noise.
Suppose we were colonized by some brotherly (fatherly?) entity (such as via living cell deposits in the fresh ocean, which were somehow known would evolve into more complex organisms in this environment) and we are simply temporarily ignorant of our relation to "the rest of our civilization" because there is something significant about "growing up unique and without outside interference", but that at some point in the future "the news will be broken to us", along the lines of a child one day being "old enough" to learn about sex from the "elders", even though the sexual potential was actually there all along? Along those same lines, perhaps it is possible for a civilization to learn of such a relationship "prematurely".
Great. We've just landed on a new space rock and already we're littering it with Hefty Cinch-Saks.
This will surely impress the Intergalactic Council whenever we're up for membership.
Wow, not only are you spouting falsities (nobody controls AAC, dude, and iTunes for Mac/Windows is a perfect way to manage the music on the thing), I really think you'd buy one if you could afford it, so you're just whining and rationalizing. Just continue to whine and don't ever get your hands on one, since you WILL want it.
You sound like the married guy with the hot flirty secretary who keeps telling himself 5 exaggerated things wrong about her every day in order to stay minimally tempted.
A great short story written by Asimov and not set in the Robot universe is "The Last Question". If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend it. Good geek stuff.
http://www.ecf.utoronto.ca/~ngn/misc/last.html
Perhaps because I'm anal, and a Slashdot reader, and a Mac user, but...
;) That is, unless I am wrong about "thing1 to thing2" corresponding to "numerator to denominator"...
If the signal-to-noise ratio of something increases, then what you're saying is that the signal is increasing relative to the noise, while your post (which I like otherwise) seems to indicate you intended otherwise.
This is actually doable, it's just convoluted and requires a browser-detect. I did this at a client last year. Google "alphaimageloader png internet explorer" for info.
What the heck does that mean? IBM will release chips that will optimally name themselves, automatically?
I config'd a pretty much maxed-out Shuttle PC (G4 8500, compact enclosure, maxed-out Athlon, etc.) for almost the same specs at $3,389, and that's WITH a 19" Samsung LCD display! They're definitely burying a handsome percentage of profit in all the options...
If every one of these voting machines printed out a line on some old dot-matrix printer in another room the instant every vote was cast, a technical difficulty would be a minor inconvenience instead of the catastrophe it is now, due to the audit trail. Cringely hints as much in this column: No Confidence Vote: Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty Much Inevitable
I hope Slashcode doesn't munge this... It's got configurable stuff. Just save locally to an html file and fire up in your open-source web browser of choice. Enjoy.
//number of output columns //hash lookup dictionary //hash table
//generate dictionaryi )]=outsymbols.charAt(Math.random()*outsymbols.leng th)+outsymbols.charAt(Math.random()*outsymbols.len gth);
//output dictionary to screen and clipboard
//hash keyword and put results on clipboard //keyword hashx t.charAt(x)];
<head>
</head>
<body>
<script language='JavaScript'>
var insymbols="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
var outsymbols="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" + "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" + "1234567890" + "!?.:@#$%^&*-+=";
var cols=4;
var dict=new Object;
var dictTable="";
for(var i=0;i<insymbols.length;i++)dict[insymbols.charAt(
for(var x=0;x<insymbols.length;x++){
dictTable+=insymbols.charAt(x)+' '+dict[insymbols.charAt(x)];
(x+1)%cols==0?dictTable+='\r\n':dictTable+=' ';
};
if(window.clipboardData){
var cleartext = window.clipboardData.getData("Text");
var hashtext="";
for(var x=0;x<cleartext.length;x++)hashtext+=dict[clearte
window.clipboardData.setData("Text",hashtext);
};
document.write("<p"+"re>");
document.write(dictTable);
document.write("</p"+"re>");
</script>
If you've copied a keyword, the hash of it, using this table, is already on the clipboard.
</body>
</html>
I work on a web app (one that I didn't design, but that I customize) that stores an md5 hash of the password in the db. And I noticed that you can still glean information from the hash, if the password is common (such as the word "password"). So my idea was to store a hash of the concatenation of the username AND password, ensuring with a high probability that no two hashes will be alike.
My understanding is that not only will the *net* energy output not be very significant, if at all (yet!), the reaction won't be expected to be sustained for more than a few minutes, even at this new facility. All these figures here are *gross* values- I haven't seen any *net* energy figures yet.
;)
That said, this is the stuff that sci-fi dreams are made of. Maybe now that less geeks are going for CS degrees, they'll take some hard-science classes- that stuff is still sorely needed. As well as cool.
I was once a physics major who couldn't cut it because of a lack of discipline to be able to master the difficulties of engineering calculus. Props.
I'm surprised that the issue of the lack of encrypted communication in this case hasn't been brought up. Pretty much limits law enforcement into only catching the more idiotic cleartext perverts. Begs the question of gov't access to encrypted communications. I wonder how many privacy-loving Slashdotters would flip on this issue if they had young children. Teenage girls spend hours chatting online these days...
1) Diatribe about Microsoft product ...Self-deprecating humorous reply to one's own post...
2) Suggestion to use an open-source browser
3) Aside about the benefits of an underdog OS
4)
5) RECURSIVE karma profit!
1) run any security updates
;)
2) strongly suggest not using Outlook
3) Completely lock down the "Internet" security zone in IE and force users to add sites that don't function properly (due to scripting turned off) to "Trusted Sites" (which has scripting on)
4) Strongly suggest that users use Firefox instead of IE wherever possible
5) Install antivirus software
6) Install Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware
This keeps most spyware, virii and worms out.
As a curious side-note, the first thing I do with a new OS X install is...
1) Apply security patches
2) There is no Step 2
I've noticed this anecdotally already.
;)
;)
I was unemployed and living in CT for 6 months (jun-december). I had put my resume info on Monster and well more than half of the responses were coming from the Boston area. I also had a girlfriend in Boston, and one day, I got an offer from a very big consulting firm there. I took the hint, packed up and moved a month and a half ago
To this day my Monster profile (now anonymized) gets at least 1 response a day, and all I am is a wimpy ASP/DHTML/SQL Server developer
There IS work out there, if you're in the right place at the right time.
I've had this discussion around the water cooler, and with friends, lots of times. If my IT job is very male-dominated, where are all the ladies at? From this, I got some advice.
;)
;) (i know it's hard! i still play one of the nerdiest games ever, Angband... which my g/f affectionately calls "gangbang" as in "Stop playing gangbang!!")
Find a friend who is dating someone in a service industry, or in nursing, or in publishing, or in marketing. Then, try to meet as many of that woman's friends as you can. I have gotten lots of dates this way. My current g/f is the classic funny, intelligent, "hottie marketing chick"... very geek-compatible (thank goodness). she doesn't program, but she can google with the best of 'em
Office romances are, of course, not recommended anyway, so you're actually way better off this way if you go the friends-of-friends route. Just requires a bit of social investment and tearing yourself away from UT2004 or bash scripting for a bit...
This is slightly off-topic, but is there a way yet to cache a compiled version of a PHP page (e.g., ASP+ or ASP.NET) so that repeated page views of unaltered code aren't wastefully re-interpreted over and over?