I didn't say anything about a panacea. But, so far, given the choice of getting ssh from some random place on the net or the ubuntu repository, I'd say the ubuntu repository is more likely to contain a good version.
Ubuntu has considerable pressure on it to keep a good repository, while anybody can take putty, add a trojan into it, and try to get a good enough pagerank to trick some people into downloading it.
And IMO, much malware can be stopped before it gets to interact with your security model. Take Win95, make the browser completely refuse to load ActiveX, refuse to directly run.exe files downloaded from the net, and remove autorun, and you've already made it a lot less likely to get infected, without even using the NT security model.
Linux, IMO, gains a lot of safety from the repository model. Sure, people still download stuff from random places sometimes. But distributions cover most of an user's need, and that at the very least means that people are very unlikely to get infected while looking for a way to uncompress.zip files, as they'll get a safe version from their distro, instead of googling and hoping that whatever site they come up with has the legitimate version.
It's not so much about perfect security as about which is more likely to get compromised when the user attempts to perform a quite mundane task like uncompressing a.zip.
WIndows NT 3.5 existed at the same time as Windows 3.1 and had most of the same security features as Windows 7.
Well, I imagine Microsoft decided to bring the NT security system into their mainstream line of OSes for a reason.
The NX bit had not been implemented by Intel, so it couldn't support that
Linux had the functionality before NX support in CPUs. It can be emulated in software, in exchange for a performance impact and restricted address space. But it was just an example.
and the UAC stuff is not really needed for security. It's just a shortcut for getting admin privs without logging in as admin.
UAC is needed to convince people not to run as an admin all the time, because using earlier Windows versions as a restricted user was very difficult without being a sysadmin with extensive knowledge of Windows administration.
Really the recent changes in Windows security has been in guiding the user to more secure practices, such as not logging in as admin.
Well, precisely, the security of different OSes varies. An OS can become less prone to malware by encouraging secure practices. Therefore there is such a thing as a more secure OS.
You're basically arguing that you can't be more secure than Windows -- Windows' security is as good as things will ever get, and everything else only gets less viruses because it has less marketshare.
But if so, why all the security advancements in the latests Windows versions? Why isn't it still using Win95 era security? Why did MS bother coding support for NX, UAC and so on? Well, because turns out, it's possible to do better. Current Windows versions are vastly more locked down than Win95, because some design choices turned out to be stupid and vulnerable.
Linux doesn't follow some common Windows security pitfalls, like having ActiveX and having the browser execute binaries from the net. It also doesn't have autorun. Just that closes several ways of compromising the system, therefore at least in that respect it's more secure. Of course it's not 100% impenetrable, but evidently there exist features and implementation details which make it easier or harder to compromise the system, so not all OSes are equally [in]secure, it depends on how they're implemented.
Re:It depends what one means by syntax...
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Monkeys With Syntax
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· Score: 1
I think it makes quite a lot of sense actually.
Take "krak" to mean something like "The scary thing on the ground" (referring to leopards), as opposed to eagles being "the scary thing in the sky". The -oo suffix makes it less specific, like "a scary thing on the ground". "Boom-boom" may mean "run" or "move".
So "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" could be translated to something like "Run! danger on the ground! danger on the ground! danger on the ground!" implying that you must move NOW, or something may fall on your head.
That always struck me as a little improbable. You mean you're just going to eat that thing right after you pressed it against a disgusting fingerprint scanner?
Won't most people end up doing that anyway?
Come to work, put the finger on the scanner, go to the cafeteria, grab a donut or something, eat it.
If the thought of eating something that touched a fingerprint scanner disgusts you, avoid thinking too much of all the crap you touch with the fingers every day, or you might vomit.
Just a few examples: your car's wheel is probably very seldom cleaned, tests have showed that keyboards have more germs on them than toilet seats, any banknote or coin you have may have passed by hundreds of other owners sick with who knows what and been dropped on a large variety of surfaces, any door handles you touch may have bacteria left by 20 other people, and so on.
With all of that, I don't think eating a gummi bear that touched a fingerprint scanner is going to add that much extra danger, in comparisons to the benefits that could be conferred by "the perfect crime"
This part is certainly a big, big concern. I can understand why Google feels the need to do it -- they want to avoid facilitating a paedophile ring or whatever -- but normal users should expect that their data is not ordinarily looked at.
Ah yes, you can justify absolutely anything in the name of fighting child porn. At this rate soon everybody will get a rectal exam at the airport, just in case they have a flash drive in there.
But interestingly enough, the same filtering doesn't apply to email, AFAIK. So I don't get what's the point.
To be fair, you can always save-as HTML/RTF/DOC/etc. and send your boss that.
Yeah, that one is easy. The big deal is when you're really using the extra stuff google docs provides.
For instance, I worked in a situation where several developers located in different countries used google docs to work on the same document. If Google suddenly decides the document can't be shared, that throws a wrench in the works. Not the end of the world for sure, but it could be very annoying and very inconvenient. It will definitely mess up the workflow. All of a sudden, instead of getting work done people have to talk to each other to explain what happened, figure out a new workflow, a way to decide who works on what part, who to mail the changes to and so on.
And since Google can take whatever time it wants with the review, you don't even get an estimation of how long will this situation last. Very not cool.
Ok, I understand that unencrypted content is never guaranteed to be safe, so don't put anything of value in there. But the general assumption people make is that there's just so much stuff in there and most of it is so uninteresting that nobody will probably bother looking at it, unless it happens to show up in debug traces by chance, or something of the sort.
But, "review" suggests somebody at Google *will* look at that content. Imagine that -- some drone at Google will be looking at your private work you want to share only with select people, or company data, and decide (when they get around it) that you can share it after all.
IMO just the possibility of this happening at all makes the whole thing suspect, and could bite you in the ass right in the worst moment. "Sorry boss, I can't share that report because Google thinks there's porn in it. We'll have to wait until somebody at Google looks at it". I'm sure that would make for an interesting day.
First one is that people can't accidentally execute some random program they downloaded with their browser. They have to intentionally save it somewhere, chmod +x, then run it. There's no "ok, ok, ok, yes I am stupid" sequence of warning dialog button selections that's going to do that, so it takes very intentional actions to run some random code you got from the web.
The second one is that Linux users don't, as a normal thing, run random programs they downloaded from the web. They generally install packages provided by their distribution. If a Linux user needs a RAR compressor they don't go hunt it around the web, possibly landing on a page offering a trojaned version, they "apt-get install" their distribution's verified version.
The first means people are very unlikely to run your code by accident, the second that you have to provide a good reason to run your malicious code.
I think that all this really proves is that if you really insist on running untrusted code on your system it can go and screw with your system (or user account). Well, duh. The question isn't whether it can happen at all, it's how easily it can happen by accident or lack of attention. If the user really insists on shooting their foot there's little anybody can do about that.
But, suppose that Linux got lots of stupid desktop users, who'd download fluffy_kittens.sh and actually go through the steps they need to run it. In that case distributions could add some extra security quite easily, by for instance denying the user the ability to run programs from non-root owned directories (grsecurity does this). This would make it so that even if the user does download your script, sets the permissions, and tries to run it, it will fail to work anyway.
Now of course there's the ld.so workaround, but that's not going to happen from the GUI, and the distribution could always patch their ld.so to obey the grsecurity restrictions
Given all this, IMO, this exercise proves very little. It proves that if you manage to convince the user to intentionally run untrusted code, it'll be able to do nasty things. But this is a given on any system that's not locked down in a really fascist manner. It'll take a cell phone-like environment with sandboxed applications to defeat that. And even there applications must be allowed to do potentially harmful things to be able to do some entirely legitimate functions.
At that point you have two possibilities: you completely refuse to run unsigned code (pissing off the user), or ask the user "do you want to let this program delete all your data?" and allow them to shoot their own foot.
Say goodbye to bacon pizzas, tasty and meaty hamburgers, hot dogs, a good grilled steak with french fries and most importantly, delicious food.
Why? It's meat in the lab. I'm sure it's possible to hook some sort of electrode to make it exercise itself, 24/7, and grow it in an optimal solution of nutrients. You'll be able to get meat developed in such a way that it would have been economically, or even technically impossible to make a cow exercise that much (if such a thing improves the taste any further, anyway)
Plus, with it being in a lab there's no cow that they have to feed antibiotics or sheep brains, so it'll probably be healthier too.
Re:Underhanded Way to Increase Comments in Code
on
Dumbing Down Programming?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ideally, a programmer should document each section of code by writing a block of comments explaining (1) why the code is used and (2) how the code works -- in plain English.
Yes, but how the code works should be pretty obvious from the code itself. The "how" you may want to explain is the overall algorithm, and that won't appear in the code on its own no matter what language you use. What will appear is a (possibly flawed or misused) implementation of it.
What you may need to describe is what the code is trying to accomplish, not what it's actually doing. A comment of "This code calculates the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences between between points X and Y" on "sqrt((P1.X - P2.X)^2 + (P1.Y-P2.Y)^2)" isn't terribly helpful.
Now an explanation of that it calculates the distance between points P1 and P2 using the pythagorean theorem would be more helpful, and an explanation of what's that used for would be better still. But there's no way more verbose code will give you that. Code is just what the program is doing, not what it should be doing, what it's trying to accomplish, and why it needs to do it.
A programming language that uses mostly English words and syntax is essentially an environment for self-documentating code
Self documenting code isn't about turning "x++" into "add one to x". That's more verbose, but doesn't explain anything extra. Self-documenting code is about writing something like:
The point is the current perception of anime. What would happen right now with an average group of people? They wouldn't stop and say "hmm, before reacting in a normal fashion, I'll spend several hundred hours researching anime to see if any of it is any good. Then I'll let my non verbal reaction to his statement show."
Everybody has seen anime, they just may not realize it.
For a start, Pokemon. But also Speed Racer, DBZ, and so on. Younger people are almost certainly familiar.
Then there's plenty anime styled stuff made in America. Teen Titans and Avatar the Last Airbender are very anime-like in style. Friend of mine commented on seeing Avatar "pity it's dubbed" (because for anime the original audio is often better)
Anyway, way to miss my point. You can make Ubuntu a better OS for watching anime without making a huge deal of it. It'll benefit the anime watchers, and will also benefit people who use the same components for something else. I fail to see how that could be a bad thing.
Somethings just aren't cool. Like Star Trek. Doesn't mean they aren't enjoyable by many people. Or that its wrong to enjoy them. But they aren't cool.
I don't really get the whole thing about Star Trek. I never had seen it before watching the last movie, and thought it was a good one.
John Coltrane? He's cool. You can hate Jazz with a passion, but that doesn't change the fact that John Coltrane is cool.
Who? I seriously have no clue who you're talking about. I have heard of Jonathan Coulton (who is cool), but you're probably referring to somebody else.
And there's precisely one thing wrong with wikipedia: people removing information.
I actually found the trivia sections useful. Because while it's very obvious for americans what a simpsons episode is referencing, in Europe most people are going to miss more than half of that. The trivia section was very useful for figuring it out.
I watch Japanese cartoons => blank stare followed by nervous eye movement looking for an exit sign.
Eh. There's more than enough anime to find something pretty much anybody will like. If in doubt, try something by Miyazaki, who is sort of the japanese Disney equivalent.
Few anything are mainstream. It's by definition. Things that are mainstream are something the majority of people appreciates. There can't be that many of those. Harry Potter is mainstream. Finnegan's Wake and countless other books aren't.
admitting that you like it takes you out of the mainstream.
To a point. You can like something without being completely obsessed about it. Somebody can be a stamp collector and still live a completely normal social life. Or they could be completely obsessed and unable to talk about anything else.
In order to encourage more mainstream adoption of Ubuntu or any other linux desktop distro, it would not be a good idea to associate it with something else outside of the mainstream.
Depends on how you do it.
Heavily promoting Ubuntu as something targeted to anime lovers would be counterproductive, yes.
On the other hand, graphics design, composing music and programming are all very non-mainstream tasks. Yet if you take everything non-mainstream together it adds up to quite a bit, and satisfying those people can mean satisfying other people at the same time as well, and gaining other benefits.
For instance, making Ubuntu a good OS to watch anime on would imply making sure the sound system works well, including a large selection of codecs, and good DVD playing tools. Doing that helps the musicians, people who work on video, and ordinary people who want to play games or watch DVDs. Anime fans often watch it subtitled; making sure subtitles work and are well readable also makes people with hearing impairments happy.
And making somebody really happy by giving them just what they're looking for can gain you a good advocate.
There are others i have heard of that you did not list, so I'd assume you did not think those were mainstream.
Eh? If we were talking about mainstream books you'd expect me to provide the entire top 100 catalog? I listed a few, not the entire list.
Yes, Yugi is mainstream. So are Ranma, Zatch Bell, Doraemon, and quite a few others.
For the purposes of that post Adult == Not specifically written for children ( Ie not pokemon or Yugi)
The japanese concept of "adult" differs from the american one.
For instance, DBZ, Naruto, One Piece and Bleach all contain enormous by american standards amounts of blood and death. Characters fairly often die in dramatic ways, including getting blown up, sliced apart, shot and beaten up to death, which usually happens after getting beaten to a bloody pulp for an episode or two. But they're still targeted to teenagers or so. They have lots of action, nothing that requires any deep thinking, and themes teenagers can enjoy.
The adult targeted stuff includes things like Elfen Lied, Battle Royale, Uzumaki, Chobits, Planetes and porn, none of which are really mainstream.
But the ones written for children are just as weird and just as Japanese.
Well, see, that's precisely one of the reasons why people like it. I'm aware that in Japan it's all horribly cliche and been done 50 times before. But outside Japan many of the plot elements and conventions are still new and refreshing. And the elements of japanese life, culture and mythology are interesting as well.
I think the deletionism is what causes the lack of low hanging fruit for a large part.
You can't get some practice by editing the article on Fidel Castro. That's almost guaranteed to cause huge arguments about politics, and discussion of wikipedia procedures related to the most minute details.
Various pop culture articles used to provide an excellent practice ground. And since TV shows and anime keep coming out there was always something to work on. If you wanted to try writing on something you could go write something about your favourite TV show, and get used to the interface, formatting, interact a bit with other people and so on. But with the strict limiting of these subjects now what remains is mostly serious subjects, which need to be approached with care. The most innocent mistakes will get you accused of being a troll.
My first attempt to contribute something not very important was initially ignored, until suddenly several weeks later it attracted lots of attention, arguments, lots of pointing to various 10 page longs WP: pages, accusations of me having an ulterior motive, and somebody adding it to some list of stupid arguments on wikipedia. It's not really welcoming. And based on things I've read on talk pages that doesn't seem to be very unusual.
The only one I've heard of is Pokemon. That is mainstream anime. I've seen bits of others on adult swim, but none that I've liked.
Whether you like it or not doesn't have to do with whether it's mainstream.
I agree, the one way to get people to avoid Linux like the plague is to associate it with weird Japanese adult cartoons.
If you think Pokemon is adult, you sure have low standards for what adult is.
Really, this obsession with adult anime people have is odd. It's like trying to reject the entire cinema medium based on the existence of porn movies. I've got friends that have bookcases full with hundreds of anime DVDs, and there's no porn in there.
But I have yet to hear any "mainstream" mention of Naruto or One Piece; even my anime/manga-following friends have to be reminded which series those are.
That's very strange. Go to One Manga for instance, and see the top popular manga for shonen (same genre as DBZ): Naruto, Bleach, One Piece.
Huge manga nerds may not be very interested though, as this is THE mainstream stuff, the anime equivalent of whatever sitcom is currently most popular. It's simple, mindless entretainment to appeal to pretty much everybody. The plot is formulaic, and they all work along the same lines: Slightly dimwitted hero with a heart of gold and huge amounts of determination saves everybody by defeating countless enemies against all odds. Pretty much every series of this kind will pontificate about the power of friendship. It can be fun to watch, but not something somebody who wants something profound or artistic would spend a lot of time on.
There's even Naruto branded ramen on sale (because the main character likes it a lot). You probably won't see it in a shop outside of Japan, but might if you go to an anime convention. Naruto cosplay is trivial -- pretty much everything can be bought already made.
The fact that the first comment was about hentai and tentacles just shows you how daft of an idea that is.
I think that's probably just the typical stupid joke.
I mean, these days, who hasn't heard of Naruto, One Piece, DBZ or Pokemon? That makes for most of the anime people see. It's not particularly deep, but that's the mainstream kind of it. There are much more interesting things to watch, but they're very niche in comparison to what I listed.
And soon after that, Ubuntu will reach out to the furries with Ubuntu Yiffy Yaffle, which will come with a wallpaper from Dark Natasha and Second Life as part of the default install.
Faith is exaclty what is required everytime you drive through a green light.
Er, no.
First of all, the law says you drive on a green light and stop on a yellow/red one.
Now, given that the law is generally obeyed in my country, it's reasonable to expect other people will follow the rules. And in my personal experience people do obey it. It's not a 100% guarantee of course, but you can reasonably expect things to work like that.
Now if I lived in some country where people think the traffic lights are just a kind of odd decoration and drive through whenever they please, then I'd stop paying attention to it, and look around to see when it is a safe time to drive through. And consider moving to a saner place.
See? No faith needed. My hypothesis of "it's safe to drive through on a green light" is backed by years of experimental evidence. If it wasn't safe because nobody pays attention to the light, then I would see that, and my hypothesis would be disproved.
The very reason you don't think faith is required is because living beings have an unshakeable faith in their own faculties and perceptions.
No, definitely not. I don't see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, only a part of it. I don't hear every frequency in existence. My vision has an acuity limit and I can't see things that are too small, too far away or behind me. Things are constantly happening that I'm unable to perceive fully (look at photos of flowers in UV some time), or at all.
Yet I can still make useful deductions based on what I perceive. Some things I perceive give useful information about that something is about to happen, in a repeatable manner. Some other things I perceive don't correlate with anything useful, so I ignore those.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say anything about a panacea. But, so far, given the choice of getting ssh from some random place on the net or the ubuntu repository, I'd say the ubuntu repository is more likely to contain a good version.
Ubuntu has considerable pressure on it to keep a good repository, while anybody can take putty, add a trojan into it, and try to get a good enough pagerank to trick some people into downloading it.
Ok, Linux has SELinux then, just install Red Hat.
And IMO, much malware can be stopped before it gets to interact with your security model. Take Win95, make the browser completely refuse to load ActiveX, refuse to directly run .exe files downloaded from the net, and remove autorun, and you've already made it a lot less likely to get infected, without even using the NT security model.
Linux, IMO, gains a lot of safety from the repository model. Sure, people still download stuff from random places sometimes. But distributions cover most of an user's need, and that at the very least means that people are very unlikely to get infected while looking for a way to uncompress .zip files, as they'll get a safe version from their distro, instead of googling and hoping that whatever site they come up with has the legitimate version.
It's not so much about perfect security as about which is more likely to get compromised when the user attempts to perform a quite mundane task like uncompressing a .zip.
Well, I imagine Microsoft decided to bring the NT security system into their mainstream line of OSes for a reason.
Linux had the functionality before NX support in CPUs. It can be emulated in software, in exchange for a performance impact and restricted address space. But it was just an example.
UAC is needed to convince people not to run as an admin all the time, because using earlier Windows versions as a restricted user was very difficult without being a sysadmin with extensive knowledge of Windows administration.
Well, precisely, the security of different OSes varies. An OS can become less prone to malware by encouraging secure practices. Therefore there is such a thing as a more secure OS.
Sorry, this line of argument is stupid.
You're basically arguing that you can't be more secure than Windows -- Windows' security is as good as things will ever get, and everything else only gets less viruses because it has less marketshare.
But if so, why all the security advancements in the latests Windows versions? Why isn't it still using Win95 era security? Why did MS bother coding support for NX, UAC and so on? Well, because turns out, it's possible to do better. Current Windows versions are vastly more locked down than Win95, because some design choices turned out to be stupid and vulnerable.
Linux doesn't follow some common Windows security pitfalls, like having ActiveX and having the browser execute binaries from the net. It also doesn't have autorun. Just that closes several ways of compromising the system, therefore at least in that respect it's more secure. Of course it's not 100% impenetrable, but evidently there exist features and implementation details which make it easier or harder to compromise the system, so not all OSes are equally [in]secure, it depends on how they're implemented.
I think it makes quite a lot of sense actually.
Take "krak" to mean something like "The scary thing on the ground" (referring to leopards), as opposed to eagles being "the scary thing in the sky". The -oo suffix makes it less specific, like "a scary thing on the ground". "Boom-boom" may mean "run" or "move".
So "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" could be translated to something like "Run! danger on the ground! danger on the ground! danger on the ground!" implying that you must move NOW, or something may fall on your head.
Won't most people end up doing that anyway?
Come to work, put the finger on the scanner, go to the cafeteria, grab a donut or something, eat it.
If the thought of eating something that touched a fingerprint scanner disgusts you, avoid thinking too much of all the crap you touch with the fingers every day, or you might vomit.
Just a few examples: your car's wheel is probably very seldom cleaned, tests have showed that keyboards have more germs on them than toilet seats, any banknote or coin you have may have passed by hundreds of other owners sick with who knows what and been dropped on a large variety of surfaces, any door handles you touch may have bacteria left by 20 other people, and so on.
With all of that, I don't think eating a gummi bear that touched a fingerprint scanner is going to add that much extra danger, in comparisons to the benefits that could be conferred by "the perfect crime"
Ah yes, you can justify absolutely anything in the name of fighting child porn. At this rate soon everybody will get a rectal exam at the airport, just in case they have a flash drive in there.
But interestingly enough, the same filtering doesn't apply to email, AFAIK. So I don't get what's the point.
Yeah, that one is easy. The big deal is when you're really using the extra stuff google docs provides.
For instance, I worked in a situation where several developers located in different countries used google docs to work on the same document. If Google suddenly decides the document can't be shared, that throws a wrench in the works. Not the end of the world for sure, but it could be very annoying and very inconvenient. It will definitely mess up the workflow. All of a sudden, instead of getting work done people have to talk to each other to explain what happened, figure out a new workflow, a way to decide who works on what part, who to mail the changes to and so on.
And since Google can take whatever time it wants with the review, you don't even get an estimation of how long will this situation last. Very not cool.
Ok, I understand that unencrypted content is never guaranteed to be safe, so don't put anything of value in there. But the general assumption people make is that there's just so much stuff in there and most of it is so uninteresting that nobody will probably bother looking at it, unless it happens to show up in debug traces by chance, or something of the sort.
But, "review" suggests somebody at Google *will* look at that content. Imagine that -- some drone at Google will be looking at your private work you want to share only with select people, or company data, and decide (when they get around it) that you can share it after all.
IMO just the possibility of this happening at all makes the whole thing suspect, and could bite you in the ass right in the worst moment. "Sorry boss, I can't share that report because Google thinks there's porn in it. We'll have to wait until somebody at Google looks at it". I'm sure that would make for an interesting day.
Halogens are only slightly more efficient.
If a normal lightbulb is about 2 - 2.5% efficient, a halogen gets 3-3.5%.
Meanwhile, a CFL is in the 11% range.
Linux has two main things over Windows:
First one is that people can't accidentally execute some random program they downloaded with their browser. They have to intentionally save it somewhere, chmod +x, then run it. There's no "ok, ok, ok, yes I am stupid" sequence of warning dialog button selections that's going to do that, so it takes very intentional actions to run some random code you got from the web.
The second one is that Linux users don't, as a normal thing, run random programs they downloaded from the web. They generally install packages provided by their distribution. If a Linux user needs a RAR compressor they don't go hunt it around the web, possibly landing on a page offering a trojaned version, they "apt-get install" their distribution's verified version.
The first means people are very unlikely to run your code by accident, the second that you have to provide a good reason to run your malicious code.
I think that all this really proves is that if you really insist on running untrusted code on your system it can go and screw with your system (or user account). Well, duh. The question isn't whether it can happen at all, it's how easily it can happen by accident or lack of attention. If the user really insists on shooting their foot there's little anybody can do about that.
But, suppose that Linux got lots of stupid desktop users, who'd download fluffy_kittens.sh and actually go through the steps they need to run it. In that case distributions could add some extra security quite easily, by for instance denying the user the ability to run programs from non-root owned directories (grsecurity does this). This would make it so that even if the user does download your script, sets the permissions, and tries to run it, it will fail to work anyway.
Now of course there's the ld.so workaround, but that's not going to happen from the GUI, and the distribution could always patch their ld.so to obey the grsecurity restrictions
Given all this, IMO, this exercise proves very little. It proves that if you manage to convince the user to intentionally run untrusted code, it'll be able to do nasty things. But this is a given on any system that's not locked down in a really fascist manner. It'll take a cell phone-like environment with sandboxed applications to defeat that. And even there applications must be allowed to do potentially harmful things to be able to do some entirely legitimate functions.
At that point you have two possibilities: you completely refuse to run unsigned code (pissing off the user), or ask the user "do you want to let this program delete all your data?" and allow them to shoot their own foot.
Why? It's meat in the lab. I'm sure it's possible to hook some sort of electrode to make it exercise itself, 24/7, and grow it in an optimal solution of nutrients. You'll be able to get meat developed in such a way that it would have been economically, or even technically impossible to make a cow exercise that much (if such a thing improves the taste any further, anyway)
Plus, with it being in a lab there's no cow that they have to feed antibiotics or sheep brains, so it'll probably be healthier too.
Yes, but how the code works should be pretty obvious from the code itself. The "how" you may want to explain is the overall algorithm, and that won't appear in the code on its own no matter what language you use. What will appear is a (possibly flawed or misused) implementation of it.
What you may need to describe is what the code is trying to accomplish, not what it's actually doing. A comment of "This code calculates the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences between between points X and Y" on "sqrt((P1.X - P2.X)^2 + (P1.Y-P2.Y)^2)" isn't terribly helpful.
Now an explanation of that it calculates the distance between points P1 and P2 using the pythagorean theorem would be more helpful, and an explanation of what's that used for would be better still. But there's no way more verbose code will give you that. Code is just what the program is doing, not what it should be doing, what it's trying to accomplish, and why it needs to do it.
Self documenting code isn't about turning "x++" into "add one to x". That's more verbose, but doesn't explain anything extra. Self-documenting code is about writing something like:
Where the naming and flow make it perfectly clear what the program is doing without any further explanations.
Everybody has seen anime, they just may not realize it.
For a start, Pokemon. But also Speed Racer, DBZ, and so on. Younger people are almost certainly familiar.
Then there's plenty anime styled stuff made in America. Teen Titans and Avatar the Last Airbender are very anime-like in style. Friend of mine commented on seeing Avatar "pity it's dubbed" (because for anime the original audio is often better)
Anyway, way to miss my point. You can make Ubuntu a better OS for watching anime without making a huge deal of it. It'll benefit the anime watchers, and will also benefit people who use the same components for something else. I fail to see how that could be a bad thing.
I don't really get the whole thing about Star Trek. I never had seen it before watching the last movie, and thought it was a good one.
Who? I seriously have no clue who you're talking about. I have heard of Jonathan Coulton (who is cool), but you're probably referring to somebody else.
And there's precisely one thing wrong with wikipedia: people removing information.
I actually found the trivia sections useful. Because while it's very obvious for americans what a simpsons episode is referencing, in Europe most people are going to miss more than half of that. The trivia section was very useful for figuring it out.
Eh. There's more than enough anime to find something pretty much anybody will like. If in doubt, try something by Miyazaki, who is sort of the japanese Disney equivalent.
Few anything are mainstream. It's by definition. Things that are mainstream are something the majority of people appreciates. There can't be that many of those. Harry Potter is mainstream. Finnegan's Wake and countless other books aren't.
To a point. You can like something without being completely obsessed about it. Somebody can be a stamp collector and still live a completely normal social life. Or they could be completely obsessed and unable to talk about anything else.
Depends on how you do it.
Heavily promoting Ubuntu as something targeted to anime lovers would be counterproductive, yes.
On the other hand, graphics design, composing music and programming are all very non-mainstream tasks. Yet if you take everything non-mainstream together it adds up to quite a bit, and satisfying those people can mean satisfying other people at the same time as well, and gaining other benefits.
For instance, making Ubuntu a good OS to watch anime on would imply making sure the sound system works well, including a large selection of codecs, and good DVD playing tools. Doing that helps the musicians, people who work on video, and ordinary people who want to play games or watch DVDs. Anime fans often watch it subtitled; making sure subtitles work and are well readable also makes people with hearing impairments happy.
And making somebody really happy by giving them just what they're looking for can gain you a good advocate.
Eh? If we were talking about mainstream books you'd expect me to provide the entire top 100 catalog? I listed a few, not the entire list.
Yes, Yugi is mainstream. So are Ranma, Zatch Bell, Doraemon, and quite a few others.
The japanese concept of "adult" differs from the american one.
For instance, DBZ, Naruto, One Piece and Bleach all contain enormous by american standards amounts of blood and death. Characters fairly often die in dramatic ways, including getting blown up, sliced apart, shot and beaten up to death, which usually happens after getting beaten to a bloody pulp for an episode or two. But they're still targeted to teenagers or so. They have lots of action, nothing that requires any deep thinking, and themes teenagers can enjoy.
The adult targeted stuff includes things like Elfen Lied, Battle Royale, Uzumaki, Chobits, Planetes and porn, none of which are really mainstream.
Well, see, that's precisely one of the reasons why people like it. I'm aware that in Japan it's all horribly cliche and been done 50 times before. But outside Japan many of the plot elements and conventions are still new and refreshing. And the elements of japanese life, culture and mythology are interesting as well.
I think the deletionism is what causes the lack of low hanging fruit for a large part.
You can't get some practice by editing the article on Fidel Castro. That's almost guaranteed to cause huge arguments about politics, and discussion of wikipedia procedures related to the most minute details.
Various pop culture articles used to provide an excellent practice ground. And since TV shows and anime keep coming out there was always something to work on. If you wanted to try writing on something you could go write something about your favourite TV show, and get used to the interface, formatting, interact a bit with other people and so on. But with the strict limiting of these subjects now what remains is mostly serious subjects, which need to be approached with care. The most innocent mistakes will get you accused of being a troll.
My first attempt to contribute something not very important was initially ignored, until suddenly several weeks later it attracted lots of attention, arguments, lots of pointing to various 10 page longs WP: pages, accusations of me having an ulterior motive, and somebody adding it to some list of stupid arguments on wikipedia. It's not really welcoming. And based on things I've read on talk pages that doesn't seem to be very unusual.
Whether you like it or not doesn't have to do with whether it's mainstream.
If you think Pokemon is adult, you sure have low standards for what adult is.
Really, this obsession with adult anime people have is odd. It's like trying to reject the entire cinema medium based on the existence of porn movies. I've got friends that have bookcases full with hundreds of anime DVDs, and there's no porn in there.
That's very strange. Go to One Manga for instance, and see the top popular manga for shonen (same genre as DBZ): Naruto, Bleach, One Piece.
Huge manga nerds may not be very interested though, as this is THE mainstream stuff, the anime equivalent of whatever sitcom is currently most popular. It's simple, mindless entretainment to appeal to pretty much everybody. The plot is formulaic, and they all work along the same lines: Slightly dimwitted hero with a heart of gold and huge amounts of determination saves everybody by defeating countless enemies against all odds. Pretty much every series of this kind will pontificate about the power of friendship. It can be fun to watch, but not something somebody who wants something profound or artistic would spend a lot of time on.
There's even Naruto branded ramen on sale (because the main character likes it a lot). You probably won't see it in a shop outside of Japan, but might if you go to an anime convention. Naruto cosplay is trivial -- pretty much everything can be bought already made.
From the post:
But it doesn't say how. Is there an explanation somewhere? I'd like to see what it was.
I think that's probably just the typical stupid joke.
I mean, these days, who hasn't heard of Naruto, One Piece, DBZ or Pokemon? That makes for most of the anime people see. It's not particularly deep, but that's the mainstream kind of it. There are much more interesting things to watch, but they're very niche in comparison to what I listed.
Which part was derisive? I find the idea of Ubuntu making that funny, but wouldn't see anything really wrong with it. I'm a furry, even.
And soon after that, Ubuntu will reach out to the furries with Ubuntu Yiffy Yaffle, which will come with a wallpaper from Dark Natasha and Second Life as part of the default install.
Er, no.
First of all, the law says you drive on a green light and stop on a yellow/red one.
Now, given that the law is generally obeyed in my country, it's reasonable to expect other people will follow the rules. And in my personal experience people do obey it. It's not a 100% guarantee of course, but you can reasonably expect things to work like that.
Now if I lived in some country where people think the traffic lights are just a kind of odd decoration and drive through whenever they please, then I'd stop paying attention to it, and look around to see when it is a safe time to drive through. And consider moving to a saner place.
See? No faith needed. My hypothesis of "it's safe to drive through on a green light" is backed by years of experimental evidence. If it wasn't safe because nobody pays attention to the light, then I would see that, and my hypothesis would be disproved.
No, definitely not. I don't see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, only a part of it. I don't hear every frequency in existence. My vision has an acuity limit and I can't see things that are too small, too far away or behind me. Things are constantly happening that I'm unable to perceive fully (look at photos of flowers in UV some time), or at all.
Yet I can still make useful deductions based on what I perceive. Some things I perceive give useful information about that something is about to happen, in a repeatable manner. Some other things I perceive don't correlate with anything useful, so I ignore those.