Yes. Some of his comments are just childish. "We'll start by learning how to type the word "become" correctly. We promise." I mean, come on. Everyone makes mistakes.
Re:I wonder
on
Starcraft
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The actual point of that experiment was to prove that octopi can learn from observation. What they did was give one octopus jars with crabs in them until it learned how to unscrew the caps. Then they put another octopus in a tank sharing a glass wall with the first one. They gave the first octopus more jars to open while the second octopus watched intently. When they gave the second one jars to open, it knew how to open them right away. That was one of the cooler experiments I've seen.
Have you looked at KDE's kiosk mode? I understand Waldo Bastian has done a lot of work locking down KDE to be suitable for use in a public environment. And with Unix, you can have reasonable security without doing silly things like disabling shell access. Unix was made for secure multi-user environments and remote administration.
Yeah, but just wait until one of the mods does anything they don't like. Poof, it'll be gone. Lucas[Film|Arts|*] doesn't have the courage to let people freely change and add to what they have done - just look at how they have gone after fansites and other fan-created things in the past. I don't know how they expect this to work.
Um, spammers don't have to adopt this solution. It is something that recipients of email do. Spammers only have to adopt it if they want their messages recieved by people who adopt it. Isn't that obvious from reading the description? If spammers don't adopt the system, their emails won't have the special tokens and they will be filtered out.
lynx also uses single letter keystrokes to do most things. Only lynx is much easier to use and more intuitive. I don't see how info needs to be that much harder to use. I shouldn't need to go through a 10-minute tutorial to get *help*! info doesn't do "whatever I thought." It doesn't have good searches (not just searching the page you're on, but the entire documentation for a program or the whole system), it doesn't have nice formatting, it doesn't have an easy-to-use interface, it doesn't even have the ability to reflow text to fit into your terminal window! 80 column wrapped plain ascii text is not my idea of great documentation. Despite the addition of hyperlinks (which can be added to manpages, see KDE's manpage viewer), info is a step backwards from manpages.
Yeah, using Konqueror to browse info pages is infinitely preferable to GNU info. But the formatting still leaves something to be desired. It's all in a monospace font, with ascii art section separators and no use of bold or italics except in the page header and the redundant "Menu" text that preceeds every list of links. It doesn't even use the browser's text flowing capabilities, everything is hard wrapped at 80 columns! It reads like an ascii text file with the addition of an incomprehensible header (like #(info)Getting Started#(info)Top#(info)Creating an Info File) and a few other links here and there. I don't know if this is the fault of the info format or info2html, but geez. It could stand a little improvement. OTOH, KDE's manpage renderer is quite nice. If info2html rendered info pages like that, info would be a bit more tolerable. But there's still the issues of searching and the lack of a standard structure for info documentation.
I groan every time I see a manpage that points me to info for more information. GNU info is an abomination. The interface to it is just totally unusable and unwieldy. The interface should be more like links. It should have fast, easy-to-use search functionality. The documentation should have color and make use of bold and underlined text to accent important regions and section headings the way manpages do. There should be standard sections for info documentation like their are for manpages (Name, Synopsis, Description, Options, Examples, Files, etc).
GNU tried to innovate in unix documentation with info, but the results were dismal. This is the year 2002, documentation doesn't have to be like this. We have learned a lot about presenting formatted documents from the web. A replacement for manpages should have hyperlinks, semantic markup, good search functionality, a good command-line reader, a GUI reader, and most importantly, quality documentation. Documentation with good formatting, good use of hyperlinks, and standard sections for quick access to relevant information. A format with these things could blow both manpages and info out of the water. It could even become a standard format for more than just unix commands. It could become a self-contained manual for using a unix system in a way that manpages aren't, and info wants to be but isn't. Wouldn't that be nice?
Wouldn't evolution have constructed lifeforms of this kind long ago if they were stable and competetive in a natural environment?
Exactly. Bacteria are the ultimate nanomachines, far more complex and efficient than anything we will be able to design for years and years. Yet no one is worried about bacteria replicating exponentially and turning the entire world into gray goo or having swarms of flying malicious bacteria that are intelligent and attack people. I found it very hard to suspend my disbelief at the incredible feats the nanobots performed in Prey.
An invisible car is not even close to being implementable with today's technology. Let me list the problems:
The shadow.
The car would have to have a gigantic contrast range on its surface. Everything from the brightest sunlight to the darkest night. What kind of display has that range of contrast? None that I know of. TVs don't even come close.
The display would have to have an incredible refresh rate to maintain the illusion when the car was moving very fast. At 60 MPH and 60 FPS, the car would be moving more than one foot every frame. This would look quite funny to your eyes if you were staring at a background and the car zoomed in front of it.
Depending on what angle you're looking at the car, it will be set against different backgrounds. The car can only show one background on its surface at any given time, so it will only work for a single observer. Tracking that observer (who might be in a car, behind a window, or in any number of other places where the camera wouldn't be able to see his whole body) in real-time from only a camera view (which will be bouncing like crazy) is currently next to impossible, and will be for quite a while.
You might wonder if the car could display different backgrounds to different observers, changing like a hologram can. This is basically the same problem as making a holographic 3D TV that doesn't require glasses. Only a lot harder because the surface of a car is curved, thin, and several square meters in area. Don't hold your breath. Also, the memory bandwidth necessary to update a whole-car holographic display at a decent framerate would be insane.
I can think of a practical use for a similar technology though: vehicle camoflage from surveillance airplanes high in the air or satellites. You only have to worry about one point of view (approximately), and the details aren't so important because the observer is far away. You could have some sort of advanced color-changing paint and a camera pointed at the ground, and the vehicle could change color to match the average ground color.
Re:Slightly Offtopic
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
To hear how Linus really pronounces his name and the name of his OS:
You think anybody would be ON Kazaa, etc if it wasn't for "ultra-shitty, ultra-popular bands like Metallica and Jon Bon Jovi"? Think again. Nobody would be on Kazaa if all it had was "small, unsigned punk bands". And with good reason - most of them are nothing special (which is why they are small and unsigned). Nothing personal against your band in particular, you might be great. But the fact is that there are oppportunities for good bands, and bands with nothing new to offer will stay small and unsigned.
What is your point? Of course you can send sound through space encoded in some form of radio transmission. But radio is not sound. There is no sound in space. Saying that there is sound in space is like saying there is sound inside the telephone wire. Sure there is information about sound waves traveling through the wire, but there is no sound. Sound is a vibration of matter. There is no matter in space to vibrate. Hence, no sound. (if you want to be pedantic about it, there is matter in space but the amount is so incredibly tiny, on the order of a few atoms per square meter, that it is not worth talking about. Certainly not enough matter there to carry sound).
Well I don't see what the problem is then. The referrer stuff is trivial to get anyway (don't browsers send the referrer as part of every HTTP request?). The only new information Red Sherrif can gather is the time spent on the last BBC page you visit and the link you use to leave the site. This information could be gotten other ways, such as links that bounce through bbc servers (http://bbc.co.uk/leavesite.cgi?www.foosite.com), although this would be a bit slower and wouldn't work in all cases.
I don't see what the big deal is. Just because the Internet wasn't originally designed such that sites couldn't tell how you left them doesn't make that information sacred. If Red Sherrif was tracking all of your browsing, then THAT would be a violation of privacy. If you're really THAT concerned about browsing totally anonymously, you should be using Anonymizer or even browsing Freenet or something.
I don't understand what this java applet is supposed to do. Is is supposed to stay in memory and watch you as you surf other sites? I don't see how it can. Java applets embedded in web pages only run while you are at the page. There are java applications that can do more stuff, but they have to be signed and I think you need to click Yes on a security dialog. What is it that this java applet actually does?
You still validate the data on the server. Duh. The idea with client-side validation is that the browser can tell the user what's wrong with the form while they're typing in the data instead of after they hit the submit button and get a form page back with big red text telling them they did it wrong.
Re:Encryption and compression make a lot of sense.
on
PKWare Zips to Growth
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· Score: 2
Who needs brute force? People silly enough to use password-protected zip files really don't care about security that much. One time I wanted to install something on a new computer from the recovery CD that came with a different computer. Everything was stored in password-protected zip files, and the recovery program checked to make sure you were using the CD right computer. But of course the recovery program itself had to know the password. A simple search of the binary turned up the command line used to launch pkzip, and the password right next to it stored as an unobfuscated string. Piece of cake.
The number of people playing Counter-Strike as opposed to other FPSes is truly staggering. Take a look at Gamespy's stats. As I post this there are over 100,000 people playing Half-Life mods, and 60,000 of those people are playing Counter-Strike. The next-highest commercial game is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, with an order of magnitude less players than Half-Life (less than 10,000).
Natural Selection isn't doing too badly for a new mod with 2700 players online at the moment. However, the ratio of players to servers for Natural Selection is much higher than for other games. This probably has to do with the large amount of processing power a Natural Selection server needs. If NS gets more servers I imagine the number of players will go up as well. It really is a unique game. It encourages teamwork and communication to a degree never before seen in any mod. I think this is its greatest strength. In CS you can play without teamwork but in NS it is really necessary. When teamwork is pretty much forced on people, it actually starts working. Good luck joining a random Counter-Strike server and forming an effective team; in Natural Selection cooperation is the norm and not the exception. Assaulting an alien hive with 3 guys backing you up and your commander watching out for you is a cool experience.
My theory is that google adds the spy links randomly about once every 100 or so pages it serves. That way they can keep track of what people are visiting statistically but the average searcher doesn't have to bounce through google's servers (adding a significant amount of time to the wait after clicking on a result link).
I don't understand ReiserFS. I keep hearing all these claims about how it is so cool and it has all these crazy features and it is going to change the idea of a filesystem. But I'm using it right now and I don't see any of that. As far as I can tell it is just another boring old UNIX filesystem like ext3 or XFS. Where are all these features hiding at? When will we see application support for these features?
Re:Why deflect Asteroids?
on
Beaming into Space
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· Score: 4, Interesting
No, we should send out little tiny spaceships that shoot dots. Then we can shoot them into smaller asteroids that split into even smaller asteroids, and then those just disappear when you shoot them. I have lots of practice with this already.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Some of his comments are just childish. "We'll start by learning how to type the word "become" correctly. We promise." I mean, come on. Everyone makes mistakes.
The actual point of that experiment was to prove that octopi can learn from observation. What they did was give one octopus jars with crabs in them until it learned how to unscrew the caps. Then they put another octopus in a tank sharing a glass wall with the first one. They gave the first octopus more jars to open while the second octopus watched intently. When they gave the second one jars to open, it knew how to open them right away. That was one of the cooler experiments I've seen.
Have you looked at KDE's kiosk mode? I understand Waldo Bastian has done a lot of work locking down KDE to be suitable for use in a public environment. And with Unix, you can have reasonable security without doing silly things like disabling shell access. Unix was made for secure multi-user environments and remote administration.
For a Linux player that can play these Sorensen files (finally), along with practically every other movie file format in existence, head here:
MPlayer
Yeah, but just wait until one of the mods does anything they don't like. Poof, it'll be gone. Lucas[Film|Arts|*] doesn't have the courage to let people freely change and add to what they have done - just look at how they have gone after fansites and other fan-created things in the past. I don't know how they expect this to work.
Um, spammers don't have to adopt this solution. It is something that recipients of email do. Spammers only have to adopt it if they want their messages recieved by people who adopt it. Isn't that obvious from reading the description? If spammers don't adopt the system, their emails won't have the special tokens and they will be filtered out.
Hey, cool. I'll definitely be using pinfo from now on. I still prefer the formatting and content of man pages to info pages though.
lynx also uses single letter keystrokes to do most things. Only lynx is much easier to use and more intuitive. I don't see how info needs to be that much harder to use. I shouldn't need to go through a 10-minute tutorial to get *help*! info doesn't do "whatever I thought." It doesn't have good searches (not just searching the page you're on, but the entire documentation for a program or the whole system), it doesn't have nice formatting, it doesn't have an easy-to-use interface, it doesn't even have the ability to reflow text to fit into your terminal window! 80 column wrapped plain ascii text is not my idea of great documentation. Despite the addition of hyperlinks (which can be added to manpages, see KDE's manpage viewer), info is a step backwards from manpages.
Yeah, using Konqueror to browse info pages is infinitely preferable to GNU info. But the formatting still leaves something to be desired. It's all in a monospace font, with ascii art section separators and no use of bold or italics except in the page header and the redundant "Menu" text that preceeds every list of links. It doesn't even use the browser's text flowing capabilities, everything is hard wrapped at 80 columns! It reads like an ascii text file with the addition of an incomprehensible header (like #(info)Getting Started#(info)Top#(info)Creating an Info File) and a few other links here and there. I don't know if this is the fault of the info format or info2html, but geez. It could stand a little improvement. OTOH, KDE's manpage renderer is quite nice. If info2html rendered info pages like that, info would be a bit more tolerable. But there's still the issues of searching and the lack of a standard structure for info documentation.
GNU tried to innovate in unix documentation with info, but the results were dismal. This is the year 2002, documentation doesn't have to be like this. We have learned a lot about presenting formatted documents from the web. A replacement for manpages should have hyperlinks, semantic markup, good search functionality, a good command-line reader, a GUI reader, and most importantly, quality documentation. Documentation with good formatting, good use of hyperlinks, and standard sections for quick access to relevant information. A format with these things could blow both manpages and info out of the water. It could even become a standard format for more than just unix commands. It could become a self-contained manual for using a unix system in a way that manpages aren't, and info wants to be but isn't. Wouldn't that be nice?
Exactly. Bacteria are the ultimate nanomachines, far more complex and efficient than anything we will be able to design for years and years. Yet no one is worried about bacteria replicating exponentially and turning the entire world into gray goo or having swarms of flying malicious bacteria that are intelligent and attack people. I found it very hard to suspend my disbelief at the incredible feats the nanobots performed in Prey.
- The shadow.
- The car would have to have a gigantic contrast range on its surface. Everything from the brightest sunlight to the darkest night. What kind of display has that range of contrast? None that I know of. TVs don't even come close.
- The display would have to have an incredible refresh rate to maintain the illusion when the car was moving very fast. At 60 MPH and 60 FPS, the car would be moving more than one foot every frame. This would look quite funny to your eyes if you were staring at a background and the car zoomed in front of it.
- Depending on what angle you're looking at the car, it will be set against different backgrounds. The car can only show one background on its surface at any given time, so it will only work for a single observer. Tracking that observer (who might be in a car, behind a window, or in any number of other places where the camera wouldn't be able to see his whole body) in real-time from only a camera view (which will be bouncing like crazy) is currently next to impossible, and will be for quite a while.
- You might wonder if the car could display different backgrounds to different observers, changing like a hologram can. This is basically the same problem as making a holographic 3D TV that doesn't require glasses. Only a lot harder because the surface of a car is curved, thin, and several square meters in area. Don't hold your breath. Also, the memory bandwidth necessary to update a whole-car holographic display at a decent framerate would be insane.
I can think of a practical use for a similar technology though: vehicle camoflage from surveillance airplanes high in the air or satellites. You only have to worry about one point of view (approximately), and the details aren't so important because the observer is far away. You could have some sort of advanced color-changing paint and a camera pointed at the ground, and the vehicle could change color to match the average ground color.No, if this were an IE bug, sites would have been designed around it in the first place and no one would ever notice except for the web designers.
You think anybody would be ON Kazaa, etc if it wasn't for "ultra-shitty, ultra-popular bands like Metallica and Jon Bon Jovi"? Think again. Nobody would be on Kazaa if all it had was "small, unsigned punk bands". And with good reason - most of them are nothing special (which is why they are small and unsigned). Nothing personal against your band in particular, you might be great. But the fact is that there are oppportunities for good bands, and bands with nothing new to offer will stay small and unsigned.
What is your point? Of course you can send sound through space encoded in some form of radio transmission. But radio is not sound. There is no sound in space. Saying that there is sound in space is like saying there is sound inside the telephone wire. Sure there is information about sound waves traveling through the wire, but there is no sound. Sound is a vibration of matter. There is no matter in space to vibrate. Hence, no sound. (if you want to be pedantic about it, there is matter in space but the amount is so incredibly tiny, on the order of a few atoms per square meter, that it is not worth talking about. Certainly not enough matter there to carry sound).
I don't see what the big deal is. Just because the Internet wasn't originally designed such that sites couldn't tell how you left them doesn't make that information sacred. If Red Sherrif was tracking all of your browsing, then THAT would be a violation of privacy. If you're really THAT concerned about browsing totally anonymously, you should be using Anonymizer or even browsing Freenet or something.
I don't understand what this java applet is supposed to do. Is is supposed to stay in memory and watch you as you surf other sites? I don't see how it can. Java applets embedded in web pages only run while you are at the page. There are java applications that can do more stuff, but they have to be signed and I think you need to click Yes on a security dialog. What is it that this java applet actually does?
You still validate the data on the server. Duh. The idea with client-side validation is that the browser can tell the user what's wrong with the form while they're typing in the data instead of after they hit the submit button and get a form page back with big red text telling them they did it wrong.
Who needs brute force? People silly enough to use password-protected zip files really don't care about security that much. One time I wanted to install something on a new computer from the recovery CD that came with a different computer. Everything was stored in password-protected zip files, and the recovery program checked to make sure you were using the CD right computer. But of course the recovery program itself had to know the password. A simple search of the binary turned up the command line used to launch pkzip, and the password right next to it stored as an unobfuscated string. Piece of cake.
BTW, the password was "magic"
VI lovers will just have to use KMail instead.
Natural Selection isn't doing too badly for a new mod with 2700 players online at the moment. However, the ratio of players to servers for Natural Selection is much higher than for other games. This probably has to do with the large amount of processing power a Natural Selection server needs. If NS gets more servers I imagine the number of players will go up as well. It really is a unique game. It encourages teamwork and communication to a degree never before seen in any mod. I think this is its greatest strength. In CS you can play without teamwork but in NS it is really necessary. When teamwork is pretty much forced on people, it actually starts working. Good luck joining a random Counter-Strike server and forming an effective team; in Natural Selection cooperation is the norm and not the exception. Assaulting an alien hive with 3 guys backing you up and your commander watching out for you is a cool experience.
My theory is that google adds the spy links randomly about once every 100 or so pages it serves. That way they can keep track of what people are visiting statistically but the average searcher doesn't have to bounce through google's servers (adding a significant amount of time to the wait after clicking on a result link).
I don't understand ReiserFS. I keep hearing all these claims about how it is so cool and it has all these crazy features and it is going to change the idea of a filesystem. But I'm using it right now and I don't see any of that. As far as I can tell it is just another boring old UNIX filesystem like ext3 or XFS. Where are all these features hiding at? When will we see application support for these features?
No, we should send out little tiny spaceships that shoot dots. Then we can shoot them into smaller asteroids that split into even smaller asteroids, and then those just disappear when you shoot them. I have lots of practice with this already.