I've just never caught on to the idea. I don't read celeberty blogs, I don't write one (who the heck would even care what I think). I used to keep a journal at one point (because, well, emacs had the ability to do it so I had to play with it of course). But seriously, I'd never consider publishing it not because its private but rather "who the heck would care"?
We're in the information overload age. People, get a clue. We need to refine our content and make it worth reading, not spew endlessly hoping it'll be useful to someone. I'm much more interested in the few words that someone wise has to say than the 1000s of words that the average masses has to say.
Of course... By posting this message to slashdot, I may have just killed my own notion of it's pointless to post stupid rambling thoughts.
so I wonder what it'll tell me about my rendition of "rubber ducky" while I take a shower?
it'd probably come back with "don't quit your day job" by "at&t".
Well, the campus is still trying to put one in and get a future site here. The public is a bit upset that they're still at it (and the campus is refusing to talk to the public self-appointed liason people). The uproar here after the last proposal round was rather strong. The campus can't convience the public that there is no reason for concern, as much as they try.
I wrote a perl script to read in a geocaching xml file, request data from the geocaching site, parse it all and output a simple text file containing all the cache descriptions in a much more condenced form than you can get from the web page. (it even uploads it to the device)
I can't imagine having done it in anything but perl. All in 250 lines. I couldn't go geocaching without it.
We must treat this as a good thing. They really have done as promised, done what everyone has wanted them to do for a while, and they started with a piece of hardware that is probably in the top 10 list for desired support (I know its the #1 driver on my "need" list).
Thank you Intel! For a company that has gotten a lot of flack on Slashdot, thank you for listening to community desires and responding in a very positive way. You went up a point in my book (which I'm sure is your goal).
What I've found is that if I can talk my parents through something over the phone, the next time they'll do it more quickly and after about 3 times that problem can now be handled on their own.
Rules of educating someone:
Don't do it yourself. Have them sit at the keyboard and tell them what to do and why they're doing it. They'll learn from the process (yes, even your parents). It's very easy to not do this, because you could do it so much faster. Sure, but you'll be doing it the next 100 times too. Think of the long run.
When you're busy and they're working on a problem give them a starting hint and have them try to see if they can find it themselves. Typically, I never ever use a windows box at home and I have never used XP except when I'm at my parents fixing their box. But given a general problem, I can say something like "find the preferences and see if you can find a checkbox that says something like XYZ or PDQ or... Try that". 7/10 times that works, they solve their own problem and learn something in the process (and your time is saved).
Give me a break. I wouldn't log out and back in to post this either, as I could careless if I get the points or not
That was my point too... I don't really care about points, as I've been topped out for years at this point.
Now, that being said I *did* forget that there is a checkbox to "post anonymously" which I am now reminded of as I post this note. IE, you don't have to log out and back in...
(I'm not normally a Karma whore, but the site looks like its normally a low-usage site)
My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County
by Avi Rubin
It is now 10:30 pm, and I have been up since 5 a.m. this morning. Today, I served as an election judge in the primary election, and I am writing down my experience now, despite being extremely tired, as everything is fresh in my mind, and this was one of the most incredible days in my life.
I first became embroiled in the current national debate on evoting security when Dan Wallach of Rice University and I, along with Computer Scientist Yoshi Kohno and my Ph.D. student Adam Stubblefield released a report analyzing the software in Diebold's Accuvote voting machines.
Although there were four of us on the project, perhaps because I was the most senior of the group, the report became widely associate with me, and people began referring to it as the "Hopkins report" or even in some cases the "Rubin report". I became the target of much criticism from Maryland and Georgia election officials who were deeply committeed to these machines, and of course, of the vendor. The biggest criticism that I received was that I am an academic scientist and that academics do not "know siccum" about elections, as Doug Lewis from the Election Center put very eloquently.
While I dispute many of the claims that computer scientists working on e-voting security analysis are deficient in their knowledge of elections, I realized that there was only one way to stifle this criticism, and at the same time to perform a civic duty. I volunteered to become an election judge in Baltimore County. The first step was to get signed up. I filled out a form at a local grocery store and waited for a call from the Baltimore County Board of Elections. The call never came. So, I called up the board and spoke with the head of elections and found out that there was a mandatory training session a couple of days later. I got on to the list for the training, and I attended. There, I learned that my entire county would be voting with Diebold Accuvote TS machines, the very one that we had analyzed in our report. It was an eery feeling as I trained for 2 hours on every aspect of using the machine and teaching others how to use them. Afterwards, I received a certificate signed by the board of elections and became a qualified judge. I was supposed to receive a phone call within a few days assigning me to a precinct, but I did not. So, I called up the board of elections and spoke with the same woman, who assigned me to a precinct at a church in Timonium, MD, about 15 minutes from my house.
I reported to my precinct at 5:45 a.m. this morning. Introductions began, and I immediately realized that it would not be a normal day. There are two head judges, one from each party. There were also seven other judges. The head judges were Marie (R) and Jim (D). Both of them mentioned that they read about me in the paper that morning, and were pretty cold towards me. It turns out that the Baltimore Sun ran a story today about my being an election judge. In there, I'm quoted as saying that the other judges in my training were in the "grandparent category" with respect to their age. My colleagues for the day, who were in that category as well, did not appreciate the barb and were ready to spar with me.
There are three types of judges besides the head judges. There are four book judges, one from each party with A-K and one from each party with L-Z. There is one judge assigned to provisional ballots, and a couple of unit judges charged with assigning voters to particular machines. I was the L-Z democrat book judge, along with Andy, a grandfather of many, a staunch Republican, and a fellow I grew very fond of as the day went on. To my left were Anne, the Republican judge married to Andy, and Sandy. Actually, there were two Sandys. One began as a unit judge, but early on switched with the other Sandy to be the democratic book judge on A-K. Bill was the provisional judge, and he is m
Re:Desktop Slide Show
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't get it. Random backdrops have been around in KDE since at least 3.0 and possible some of the 2.x series (I don't remember that far back). They just changed the name to "slideshow" and suddenly everyone seems to think its new!
These guys are smart, you have to admit. They've convienced you, the nice citizen, to pony up some dough and help fund a senator. You know the next thing they're going to do is go to the senator and say "See how much money we raised for you? See how nice we've been to you? Now... Let's talk about patents for a moment..."
In a computer testing center after had about 4 hours of sleep and next door they were using nail guns to rebuild the office. At least the testing service appologized to me for the noise they couldn't control (which had the potential to ruin my graduate career). Fortunately I actually did pretty well anyway.
(then there was the time I mapped a network by physically looking at the cables running between a bunch of labs. Under the floor. Manually pulling up floor tiles, sticking my head down and looking with a flashlight as far as I could see then walking to the next stop, pulling up a tile and following it further... fun)
I've been working at home for 3 years now, but granted I have a stay-at-home wife with 2 kids so I get too much interaction sometimes. However, I strongly recommend just finding a cyber-cafe and working there. I've done this alot, as has a co-worker who also works from home. It really helps with the social interaction and you get out and about. Plus the addiction to caffeen is wonderful.
I've worked every possibility over the sun, including:
100% at the office.
100% at home (now)
1/2 days at the office.
2 days at the office, 3 at home.
3 days at the office, 2 at home.
Of all of those, by far the best choice was #4. 3 days at home let me be very productive and then I spent the other 2 days interacting. Specifically, the Tue/Thur in the office combination was the best. We'd talk about stuff one day, and I'd go home and blast away at it the next and then return the day after with whatever new problems/thoughts/ideas that arose. It was the most productive and just fine at a social level.
Perfect example of how open-source has failed us; EVERYBODY's gotta invent their own wheel instead of helping to make the existing wheel(s) better.
Yep. Thats because most coders out there are not ones who want to delve into optimization of someone elses code (because it's hard). So, they think "It must be something they did in the process, thus if I write something new, it certainly will be better, right?".
Actually, a good starting open source project would be a really good code optimization tool which is better in its output than the current
optimization tool. One that makes it more obvious to the newbie-coder where there problems are. The ones out there now give good technical results, but are hard for newbies to understand.
Ok, my main point was missed by three replies, so I picked one but it applies to the others as well:
My problem is the way it's phrased. I know he's pissed at all the people that don't call it GNU/Linux, but Linus wrote a unix kernel. He did not write a kernel designed for the GNU tools (though it was an obvious choice of utilities to put underneath it). My problem is the way that RMS says Linus followed the GNU design. I'd argue he didn't. He followed the Unix design which has been around for ages. The text is misleading. There's a shadowing of dependency which isn't true (IMHO, INAL, ETC)
1. We designed the GNU system, from the outset in 1984, as a multi-user timesharing system with security features. An ordinary user cannot change the system software. Linux, Torvalds' 1991 kernel, followed this design as well.
Can some one please explain to me how he claims to have designed features that have been around in unix a lot longer than 1984? GNU software basicly copied a millon other applications as Unix replacements.
Now, I'm normally neutral on the RMS issue, but this one just makes me go "huh".
One of the things that major media distribution companies (including music, video, games, etc) argue is that the only reason the prices are so high on media is that piracy of their product makes the prices go up. Many, however, are not convienced of this argument and think the prices would likely stay the same and the profits of the company would be the only thing affected (which is what I think annoys most of the users of the world: that the cost is so high when production costs are so low). Do you have a feel for whether on at least whether the music industry really would lower the prices on all its media if the piracy came to a sudden end, or do you think the prices would just stay the same?
Find an old post which was funny, wait a while, and repost the same comment under a different thread and even when you attribute it properly you still get Karma points!
yeah, but its how slow the law changes that should scare you.
Plus you know the law would be written like "A computer user must manually actively active a link for a legal binding to have an effect; All computers must enforce digital rights management"
which not only allows for click-through-licensing but ties on a second hidden agenda (pick your topic). Everyone will think the first sentence would do what they wanted and not care about the rest. Hmm... sounds like I'm kind of bitter about the current state of the legal system.
What about phrases like "by clicking on this link you agree to let us call your house" kind of things (where the link containers a token for identification purposes). Having a filter auto-follow links could be really dangerous then.
The interesting thing is how the courts would end up viewing auto-clicks vs manual clicks. I'd bet that if a user set up a filter then it would be effectively view as the user doing the clicking...
There are many open source projects that are government funded. The US government (many branches including everything fromDARPA to homeland sec. to the NSA to...) hire software contractors to produce something. The stipulation is frequently that the contractor gets to copyright the code anyway they want but the government is required to have a license to the resulting code as well.
Now, many government contractors happen to be in it more for the fun than making products and reselling them. So many OSS projects are started as a result of government funding. Most of the time one of the US governments goals is to get as much adoption of the work as possible, so they're frequently all for OSS projects getting started from their work. Ideally, many of which use the BSD copyright license since it is usable by both commerical companies and non-commerical companies (lets not debate that please).
Anyway, I've been involved in this process for years now and I personally have been involved with government funded contributions to about 10 different OSS packages. It's a good thing.
However, after 9/11 less and less money is available this way as the government has been shifting more and more money toward classified programs (though even the classified programs can kick out their non-classified publically-usable code, and I'm seeing that now as well).
Another note: many of the IETF protocols had goverment funding of either the documentation themselves or at least initial prototypes.
X-Men 2! Did the MPAA post this, because this is almost the exact same story that the X-Men comics/cartoons/movies have been "covering" for a long time.
We already have this for physical objects...
on
Geocoding All Content
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Look on the bottom of your shoe. It likely says something like "Made in China" (picking a common country at random).
If we did this for computer software, we'd simply have tags in the help menu that said "Made in Redmond?"
Don't the monitors know smoking causes cancer? We need a anti-smoking advertising series targeted for youthful monitors of tomorrow. Sponsored by an mandated tax on the sale of monitors, of course.
Oh, I thought that was just a quake feature for every time I fired the BFG!
(on a side note, big kudos to IBM for actually being willing to fix the problem instead of just hiding it or merely announcing the problem without being willing to fix it)
Ok, I know this is way off topic but it was in this comment set that I saw my first M$ add on slashdot. I haven't been paying the extra add-free slashdot fee and thus get the in-line advertisements which I normally glance at and scroll down. I was shocked today to find that M$ actually wanted to advertise here (especially considering the borg icon their news items get here).
Of course, this may be enough to get me to pay for the add-free fee.
Slashdot Mirror
We're in the information overload age. People, get a clue. We need to refine our content and make it worth reading, not spew endlessly hoping it'll be useful to someone. I'm much more interested in the few words that someone wise has to say than the 1000s of words that the average masses has to say.
Of course... By posting this message to slashdot, I may have just killed my own notion of it's pointless to post stupid rambling thoughts.
so I wonder what it'll tell me about my rendition of "rubber ducky" while I take a shower?
it'd probably come back with "don't quit your day job" by "at&t".
Well, the campus is still trying to put one in and get a future site here. The public is a bit upset that they're still at it (and the campus is refusing to talk to the public self-appointed liason people). The uproar here after the last proposal round was rather strong. The campus can't convience the public that there is no reason for concern, as much as they try.
Ah, Davis politics. It's a fun place to live.
I can't imagine having done it in anything but perl. All in 250 lines. I couldn't go geocaching without it.
Thank you Intel! For a company that has gotten a lot of flack on Slashdot, thank you for listening to community desires and responding in a very positive way. You went up a point in my book (which I'm sure is your goal).
Rules of educating someone:
That was my point too... I don't really care about points, as I've been topped out for years at this point.
Now, that being said I *did* forget that there is a checkbox to "post anonymously" which I am now reminded of as I post this note. IE, you don't have to log out and back in...
(I'm not normally a Karma whore, but the site looks like its normally a low-usage site)
My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County
by Avi Rubin
It is now 10:30 pm, and I have been up since 5 a.m. this morning. Today, I served as an election judge in the primary election, and I am writing down my experience now, despite being extremely tired, as everything is fresh in my mind, and this was one of the most incredible days in my life.
I first became embroiled in the current national debate on evoting security when Dan Wallach of Rice University and I, along with Computer Scientist Yoshi Kohno and my Ph.D. student Adam Stubblefield released a report analyzing the software in Diebold's Accuvote voting machines.
Although there were four of us on the project, perhaps because I was the most senior of the group, the report became widely associate with me, and people began referring to it as the "Hopkins report" or even in some cases the "Rubin report". I became the target of much criticism from Maryland and Georgia election officials who were deeply committeed to these machines, and of course, of the vendor. The biggest criticism that I received was that I am an academic scientist and that academics do not "know siccum" about elections, as Doug Lewis from the Election Center put very eloquently.
While I dispute many of the claims that computer scientists working on e-voting security analysis are deficient in their knowledge of elections, I realized that there was only one way to stifle this criticism, and at the same time to perform a civic duty. I volunteered to become an election judge in Baltimore County. The first step was to get signed up. I filled out a form at a local grocery store and waited for a call from the Baltimore County Board of Elections. The call never came. So, I called up the board and spoke with the head of elections and found out that there was a mandatory training session a couple of days later. I got on to the list for the training, and I attended. There, I learned that my entire county would be voting with Diebold Accuvote TS machines, the very one that we had analyzed in our report. It was an eery feeling as I trained for 2 hours on every aspect of using the machine and teaching others how to use them. Afterwards, I received a certificate signed by the board of elections and became a qualified judge. I was supposed to receive a phone call within a few days assigning me to a precinct, but I did not. So, I called up the board of elections and spoke with the same woman, who assigned me to a precinct at a church in Timonium, MD, about 15 minutes from my house.
I reported to my precinct at 5:45 a.m. this morning. Introductions began, and I immediately realized that it would not be a normal day. There are two head judges, one from each party. There were also seven other judges. The head judges were Marie (R) and Jim (D). Both of them mentioned that they read about me in the paper that morning, and were pretty cold towards me. It turns out that the Baltimore Sun ran a story today about my being an election judge. In there, I'm quoted as saying that the other judges in my training were in the "grandparent category" with respect to their age. My colleagues for the day, who were in that category as well, did not appreciate the barb and were ready to spar with me.
There are three types of judges besides the head judges. There are four book judges, one from each party with A-K and one from each party with L-Z. There is one judge assigned to provisional ballots, and a couple of unit judges charged with assigning voters to particular machines. I was the L-Z democrat book judge, along with Andy, a grandfather of many, a staunch Republican, and a fellow I grew very fond of as the day went on. To my left were Anne, the Republican judge married to Andy, and Sandy. Actually, there were two Sandys. One began as a unit judge, but early on switched with the other Sandy to be the democratic book judge on A-K. Bill was the provisional judge, and he is m
I don't get it. Random backdrops have been around in KDE since at least 3.0 and possible some of the 2.x series (I don't remember that far back). They just changed the name to "slideshow" and suddenly everyone seems to think its new!
These guys are smart, you have to admit. They've convienced you, the nice citizen, to pony up some dough and help fund a senator. You know the next thing they're going to do is go to the senator and say "See how much money we raised for you? See how nice we've been to you? Now... Let's talk about patents for a moment..."
(then there was the time I mapped a network by physically looking at the cables running between a bunch of labs. Under the floor. Manually pulling up floor tiles, sticking my head down and looking with a flashlight as far as I could see then walking to the next stop, pulling up a tile and following it further... fun)
I've worked every possibility over the sun, including:
- 100% at the office.
- 100% at home (now)
- 1/2 days at the office.
- 2 days at the office, 3 at home.
- 3 days at the office, 2 at home.
Of all of those, by far the best choice was #4. 3 days at home let me be very productive and then I spent the other 2 days interacting. Specifically, the Tue/Thur in the office combination was the best. We'd talk about stuff one day, and I'd go home and blast away at it the next and then return the day after with whatever new problems/thoughts/ideas that arose. It was the most productive and just fine at a social level.Yep. Thats because most coders out there are not ones who want to delve into optimization of someone elses code (because it's hard). So, they think "It must be something they did in the process, thus if I write something new, it certainly will be better, right?".
Actually, a good starting open source project would be a really good code optimization tool which is better in its output than the current optimization tool. One that makes it more obvious to the newbie-coder where there problems are. The ones out there now give good technical results, but are hard for newbies to understand.
My problem is the way it's phrased. I know he's pissed at all the people that don't call it GNU/Linux, but Linus wrote a unix kernel. He did not write a kernel designed for the GNU tools (though it was an obvious choice of utilities to put underneath it). My problem is the way that RMS says Linus followed the GNU design. I'd argue he didn't. He followed the Unix design which has been around for ages. The text is misleading. There's a shadowing of dependency which isn't true (IMHO, INAL, ETC)
Can some one please explain to me how he claims to have designed features that have been around in unix a lot longer than 1984? GNU software basicly copied a millon other applications as Unix replacements.
Now, I'm normally neutral on the RMS issue, but this one just makes me go "huh".
That means I not only need to look for keyboard cable keystroke recorders, but I need to start looking for mouse recorders as well?
One of the things that major media distribution companies (including music, video, games, etc) argue is that the only reason the prices are so high on media is that piracy of their product makes the prices go up. Many, however, are not convienced of this argument and think the prices would likely stay the same and the profits of the company would be the only thing affected (which is what I think annoys most of the users of the world: that the cost is so high when production costs are so low). Do you have a feel for whether on at least whether the music industry really would lower the prices on all its media if the piracy came to a sudden end, or do you think the prices would just stay the same?
Find an old post which was funny, wait a while, and repost the same comment under a different thread and even when you attribute it properly you still get Karma points!
Very nice!
(this is just a poke at ya of course ;-)
Plus you know the law would be written like "A computer user must manually actively active a link for a legal binding to have an effect; All computers must enforce digital rights management"
which not only allows for click-through-licensing but ties on a second hidden agenda (pick your topic). Everyone will think the first sentence would do what they wanted and not care about the rest. Hmm... sounds like I'm kind of bitter about the current state of the legal system.
The interesting thing is how the courts would end up viewing auto-clicks vs manual clicks. I'd bet that if a user set up a filter then it would be effectively view as the user doing the clicking...
Now, many government contractors happen to be in it more for the fun than making products and reselling them. So many OSS projects are started as a result of government funding. Most of the time one of the US governments goals is to get as much adoption of the work as possible, so they're frequently all for OSS projects getting started from their work. Ideally, many of which use the BSD copyright license since it is usable by both commerical companies and non-commerical companies (lets not debate that please).
Anyway, I've been involved in this process for years now and I personally have been involved with government funded contributions to about 10 different OSS packages. It's a good thing.
However, after 9/11 less and less money is available this way as the government has been shifting more and more money toward classified programs (though even the classified programs can kick out their non-classified publically-usable code, and I'm seeing that now as well).
Another note: many of the IETF protocols had goverment funding of either the documentation themselves or at least initial prototypes.
X-Men 2! Did the MPAA post this, because this is almost the exact same story that the X-Men comics/cartoons/movies have been "covering" for a long time.
Look on the bottom of your shoe. It likely says something like "Made in China" (picking a common country at random). If we did this for computer software, we'd simply have tags in the help menu that said "Made in Redmond?"
(on a side note, big kudos to IBM for actually being willing to fix the problem instead of just hiding it or merely announcing the problem without being willing to fix it)
Of course, this may be enough to get me to pay for the add-free fee.