One of the usual ways of misusing condoms is to start intercourse and pause sometime before orgasm to put it on. This renders it useless against many STDs and neglects the fact that pre-seminal fluid might contain sperm. The warning might be referring to that.
While McDonald's and Starbucks can afford to make the effort to find the perfect temperature at which to sell their hot beverages, it's a sad sad life if the only hot liquids you place in your mouth come from a fast food corporation.
From the first sips of hot home-made tea I took in my life my mother taught me to be careful and check the temperature least I burn my tongue or mouth. I never attempted to chug down hot coffee like it was coke... the only way I can think of to get third degree burns in the stomach.
The ability to sue is a poor replacement to knowing how to get around in life.
In case you do, I'd consider separating some amount as soon as you win (since it's a donation it'd be tax deductable), set some kind of fund where the money earns interests and you separate a set amount each year for Linux projects. If you initially set a target amount of time (say, 10 years) you can maximize the amount you'd be giving.
A proof of correctness for such a large system would be unthinkable... a proof can be hard enough to do for a small algorithm, like say, an encryption method. But here you'd start having to get proof for the GUI, so you'd need to give proof for the graphic APIs, OS Shell in general and then the full OS (yes... even writing an unproved spec for libc would be a daunting task).
Even if you could just check the app while blindingly trusting the OS and APIs, you'd have to give proof for the GUI, the db backend, the vote distribution mechanism, the server soft where the votes are counted, etc.
Formal proof It's not feasible at that scale. And even then, as with all mathematical proofs, facts are not checked down to the last axiom... they're peer reviewed for some time until everybody is quite confident that no steps were worng. That is no necessarily fair to voters.
When I talk about a "bitmap" I'm not talking about a BMP file. A "Bitmap" is a pixel-matrix representation of an image.
If you load up a JPEG in Photoshop, it's stored internally as a bitmap... if you change a couple of pixels and save, you take a quality loss because of the original digital artifacts.
When you burn an MP3 as a CD, you're doing the equivalent of a JPEG->Bitmap conversion... since the song is stored as an uncompressed PCM waveform in the CD. When you recompress it you take a quality loss, since the original MP3 encoding is not stored in the CD, so the compressor can't tell what's data and what's digital artifacts.
No. A program could be smart enough to notice you're trying to save an unchanged JPEG in the same quality it already was in, and do nothing... but that's not what we're talking about here. If the JPEG gets turned into a bitmap, and then the bitmap turned into a JPEG again then the compressing algorithm has no way to differentiate the image from the "digital artifacts" (noise, distortion) than the first compression added... so it might spend some bits in trying to encode said artifacts, with further loss to the original image.
I love vegetarian/vegan food (though I also eat meat occasionally) and many of the times I go to a restaurant it'll be an Indian/vegetarian place. I also cook at home, and one of my most valued cookbooks is an Australian vegetarian book. I get great enjoyment out of a perfectly healthy plate of organic food.
That said... I know that one of the biggest and simplest tricks up any chef's sleeve is adding fat. Either a good chunk of butter (with meats, for instance) or cream (in sauces and the like) works wonders for flavor and enjoyment. Most good restaurants will add some fat just for effect.
It's probably safe if you just get this extra fat every now and then... but still, my point is: there's a relation between good flavor and somewhat unhealthy ingredients, and that relation wasn't invented by Lays or McDonald's. Anyone trying to sell food (without emphasizing the health aspect) will probably exploit those ingredients.
Such a decision from a professional software firm can't be called lazy... companies take decisions based on how much it costs. You can accuse them of being cheap, but not of being lazy.
While cowardly... you might be "brave" to allow installation of certain types of software in an unsupported system: games, media players, p2p apps, a web browser... but allowing the installation of a Malware removal tool in an unsupported system is suicidal. That's the kind of software you don't want uncertain behavior from.
I'm trying hard to understand the purpose of this, to no avail...
First, I think it's ridiculous to block Child Porn from people who might accidentally stumble upon it. If you come across a CP site your free to easily close the window or to register the address and take appropriate measures (report the IP address to authorities or something). I can't think of any other illegal activity where the state is concerned from people accidentally witnessing it while they don't do anything about it.
Second, I assume we agree that someone actually looking for CP won't be stopped because of this filtering. Perhaps he'll have to work harder to access the site, but there are many ways around ISP filtering.
Third, the article talks about "protecting children online". Are they concerned about children accidentally (or willingly) accessing CP? The younger a child is, the bigger the chance he/she has to access what would otherwise be considered child porn without requiring the net... sometimes looking in the mirror is enough. I'd be more concerned about the child posing in the picture than about a child that might be looking at it. I guess most parents would like to shield their kids from all porn, and not just the more illegal ones.
Yeah, but more specifically most computers don't know how to deal with integers or real numbers either... Neither 32 bit nor 64 bit signed integers are actual integers... and floating point numbers are certainly neither rational nor real numbers.
But I *KNOW* that Microsoft Word is not transferring whatever I type to Microsoft or other third party (the network traffic would be a giveaway)... and I also *KNOW* that Google keeps the full text (and all revisions) of whatever I write in Google Docs.
Even if they "do no evil", they could be forced by law (or hacking) to release my documents.
Anyway, Google Docs is not a replacement for MS Word (yet, at least)... but rather to Wordpad. It lacks even basic word processor functionality. I still like it and use it, but more in a collaborative "closed wiki" fashion.
Most attachment filters already search inside compressed archives.
I suffer from this all the time, since I'm a developer of custom systems and many times I need to send back and forth executables, scripts (Javascript and such) and DLLs since the customers I work with have SMTP filtering.
Workarounds range from encrypted RAR files to using webmail services (not GMail, which also filters) or sending the attachment through YouSendIt.com.
It IS faster, at some point... because DOS 6.22, Win 3.11 or Win 95 for that matter wouldn't support 64 bit processors, USB 2.0, SATA disks, etc. Installing it in a modern computer would be a huge waste of perfect hardware.
Also, Win95 had much better multitasking than 3.11 (or DOS, which wasn't multitasking at all) so that's "faster" in some sense as well.
Of course newer operating systems are more taxing on resources... but they also can assume the user has a better computer.
Saying an iPOD will be able to store every video ever produced is like saying that eventually will have digital optical discs with enough capacity to hold the whole internet. It misses the point completely.
Once upon a time we'd go and buy a good soft repository (like SIMTEL, to name one) in a couple of CDs... and that would take care of the need to download files off BBSs. Now the internet is more about dynamic content (like Slashdot), and the constant generation of new static content (like new videos uploaded daily to YouTube, new flash animations, etc.). The speed of software distribution makes shareware/freeware CDs pointless, since they can become obsolete in a month.
So, thinking about holding every video in an iPOD sounds to me like thinking of tomorrow technology in today's terms.
We already have video cameras in most modern cell phones, palms, etc. so let me assume the live streaming of HD video, and other new forms of amateur video, will seriously define what YouTube will be like in the future. And holding every single video in existence won't sound so logical.
A couple of years ago I attended a speech by a local (Argentine) OSS developer/evangelist group. One of the guys giving the speech stuck around after the event and a small group of people chatting with him formed.
I approached and listened as he talked about a project they were working on, to bring a full Linux solution for small business... this was a short while after the big economic crisis which devalued our money to a third of its previous value. With Windows licenses going through the roof, this project was more important than ever. They had already chosen a friendly distro, a software suite and were working on a CRM solution based on the leading small-business commercial CRM solution here in Argentina, which was the key component. So far, so good.
He mentioned what percentage of desired functionality they had reached, which wasn't very big... and mentioned the solution wasn't very stable yet. Then he mentioned they developed a new multi platform GUI framework for this project, which was great because it could be ported to all kinds of GUI environments (X, Win32, etc.) On and on he went about how great this was, and how they had implemented all the different widgets and how they had written modules to support different environments and were even working on a module for curses support.
By that point I realized these guys were lost... because even though they knew a good CRM solution was a key selling point, they didn't care much about programming that kind of thing. Apparently they'd rather reinvent the wheel and cook up something that probably would be worse than the many free portable windowing frameworks already available (which they actually didn't need since they wanted to create a full small business linux distro in the first place), and then waste time on the completely irrelevant curses support.
That's a problem I see with OSS, specially in small communities like here in Argentina. A lack of focus or discipline means that a lot of the valuable manpower is wasted. Leadership is important as an inspiration to pursue a path, because programmers will program what they want to program when not on a leash... so it's important that what they want to program is what needs to be programmed.
I wouldn't explain the menu usage to change a font, nor the general use of menus... I'd teach about fonts instead, what they are and how you can change them. Then I'd explain that you can count on any program to let you change font type and size in a mostly straightforward manner which should be easy to find.
An expert user can find out how to change fonts without knowing where the functionality is, and even if you give him a unique GUI... but because he knows it's there and that it's not far away, and that it has to do with text formatting so it's probably somewhere close to the "Bold" and "Italics" option, etc.
Just the other day I told a friend about the "Fill Down" option in Excel, and she was thrilled because she didn't know it... not because it's hard to find, but because she didn't know it was a basic functionality of a spreadsheet. When she needs "Fill Right" (which I didn't tell her about) she'll probably find it quite easily. On the other hand, Google Spreadsheet doesn't have a visibile "Fill Down" option anywhere... but I was counting on it existing (to me it wouldn't make sense to use a spreadsheet without it) so I blindly tried CTRL+D an indeed it worked.
Morale: People will search everywhere for the functionality they know exists, but won't click on the unknown button that's sitting right in front of them without good reason.
I think the web (web 2.0 particularly) threw the concept of "uniform UI" out the window. Once the average user was supposed to learn to use a small, consistent and coherent set of widgets, practices, metaphors, etc. now they are exposed to different login procedures, different password schemes, captchas (an absolute UI WTF), flash interfaces, AJAX interfaces, JAVA interfaces, standard Web forms, etc. Thanks to web apps we kissed much of the work on localization, accesibility and contextual help goodbye.
Today there are lots of inexperienced computer users who still manage to:
Use windows.
Use a browser.
Use an IM client.
Use an email client or webmail site.
Use some social network site, like the complete UI mess that is MySpace, or blogs, photologs, etc.
Use a p2p client
Just with that basic usage they're exposed to a ton of different widgets, metaphors and procedures Even users who call the little blue icon with the 'e' "The Internet".
So, sure... some people will feel lost at first, but I think a complete UI overhaul is much manageable now than it was before the coming of the net.
Read my words a little bit better, and with a little bit of good will (just enough to not assume I'm a complete idiot)... would you? I never stated that americans would be lazy or stupid for not typing accents.
What I DID say is that even among people that SHOULD type the accents (that is, people in spanish speaking countries), it's not consistently done. Some are lazy, some have poor spelling.
I certainly never called you either lazy or stupid, but you managed to state I was both. Nice way of having a healthy discussion...
If you are spanish-speaking (which was my example) not knowing how to place accents is not an excuse. They're a fundamental part of the language, unlike in english where they're only required for foreign words written in their original form.
In Argentina some people have keyboards with spanish language distribution (that is, with extra letters) and some learn the ASCII codes and use the ALT key (along with the code typed in the Numpad) to place accents and the letters Ñ and ñ (which are mandatory as well and can't be replaced by N or n... specially when Año means "year" and Ano means "Anus").
I know of many people that know how to place accents and are just lazy... but I consider that a sign of poor spelling as well, since the best spellers I know use all accents and get a bit of pain every time they find an omission (which normally changes the meaning of the word, makes fluent reading a bit more difficult, and it's just ugly).
Slashdot Mirror
One of the usual ways of misusing condoms is to start intercourse and pause sometime before orgasm to put it on. This renders it useless against many STDs and neglects the fact that pre-seminal fluid might contain sperm. The warning might be referring to that.
The worst burn I remember getting in my mouth was from homemade hot chocolate. I never got to sue my cousin's grandmother for it.
While McDonald's and Starbucks can afford to make the effort to find the perfect temperature at which to sell their hot beverages, it's a sad sad life if the only hot liquids you place in your mouth come from a fast food corporation.
From the first sips of hot home-made tea I took in my life my mother taught me to be careful and check the temperature least I burn my tongue or mouth. I never attempted to chug down hot coffee like it was coke... the only way I can think of to get third degree burns in the stomach.
The ability to sue is a poor replacement to knowing how to get around in life.
According to the course, rm is a standard unix utility whose abbreviated name stands for "Remove Malware".
In one of the lessons you're supposed to scan your p2p downloads directory for malware using rm.
The course is no longer available following the link in the article.
a nd-Computer-Science/6-912January--IAP--2006/Course Home/index.htm
The new link is:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-
In case you do, I'd consider separating some amount as soon as you win (since it's a donation it'd be tax deductable), set some kind of fund where the money earns interests and you separate a set amount each year for Linux projects. If you initially set a target amount of time (say, 10 years) you can maximize the amount you'd be giving.
A proof of correctness for such a large system would be unthinkable... a proof can be hard enough to do for a small algorithm, like say, an encryption method. But here you'd start having to get proof for the GUI, so you'd need to give proof for the graphic APIs, OS Shell in general and then the full OS (yes... even writing an unproved spec for libc would be a daunting task).
Even if you could just check the app while blindingly trusting the OS and APIs, you'd have to give proof for the GUI, the db backend, the vote distribution mechanism, the server soft where the votes are counted, etc.
Formal proof It's not feasible at that scale. And even then, as with all mathematical proofs, facts are not checked down to the last axiom... they're peer reviewed for some time until everybody is quite confident that no steps were worng. That is no necessarily fair to voters.
When I talk about a "bitmap" I'm not talking about a BMP file. A "Bitmap" is a pixel-matrix representation of an image.
If you load up a JPEG in Photoshop, it's stored internally as a bitmap... if you change a couple of pixels and save, you take a quality loss because of the original digital artifacts.
When you burn an MP3 as a CD, you're doing the equivalent of a JPEG->Bitmap conversion... since the song is stored as an uncompressed PCM waveform in the CD. When you recompress it you take a quality loss, since the original MP3 encoding is not stored in the CD, so the compressor can't tell what's data and what's digital artifacts.
No. A program could be smart enough to notice you're trying to save an unchanged JPEG in the same quality it already was in, and do nothing... but that's not what we're talking about here. If the JPEG gets turned into a bitmap, and then the bitmap turned into a JPEG again then the compressing algorithm has no way to differentiate the image from the "digital artifacts" (noise, distortion) than the first compression added... so it might spend some bits in trying to encode said artifacts, with further loss to the original image.
It's the same with audio.
I love vegetarian/vegan food (though I also eat meat occasionally) and many of the times I go to a restaurant it'll be an Indian/vegetarian place. I also cook at home, and one of my most valued cookbooks is an Australian vegetarian book. I get great enjoyment out of a perfectly healthy plate of organic food.
That said... I know that one of the biggest and simplest tricks up any chef's sleeve is adding fat. Either a good chunk of butter (with meats, for instance) or cream (in sauces and the like) works wonders for flavor and enjoyment. Most good restaurants will add some fat just for effect.
It's probably safe if you just get this extra fat every now and then... but still, my point is: there's a relation between good flavor and somewhat unhealthy ingredients, and that relation wasn't invented by Lays or McDonald's. Anyone trying to sell food (without emphasizing the health aspect) will probably exploit those ingredients.
That's what some developers in Argentina make... though many get twice as much. I guess the average must be more like around 8k or 10k a year.
Compliance to standards thoughtfully developed by a committee... ... the reason why we're all using ISO-OSI Network stacks instead of TCP/IP.
Oh, wait!
Standards sound like a good idea, sure, but ignoring them wouldn't be a first in the history of mankind.
Cowardly and lazy?
Such a decision from a professional software firm can't be called lazy... companies take decisions based on how much it costs. You can accuse them of being cheap, but not of being lazy.
While cowardly... you might be "brave" to allow installation of certain types of software in an unsupported system: games, media players, p2p apps, a web browser... but allowing the installation of a Malware removal tool in an unsupported system is suicidal. That's the kind of software you don't want uncertain behavior from.
I'm trying hard to understand the purpose of this, to no avail...
First, I think it's ridiculous to block Child Porn from people who might accidentally stumble upon it. If you come across a CP site your free to easily close the window or to register the address and take appropriate measures (report the IP address to authorities or something). I can't think of any other illegal activity where the state is concerned from people accidentally witnessing it while they don't do anything about it.
Second, I assume we agree that someone actually looking for CP won't be stopped because of this filtering. Perhaps he'll have to work harder to access the site, but there are many ways around ISP filtering.
Third, the article talks about "protecting children online". Are they concerned about children accidentally (or willingly) accessing CP? The younger a child is, the bigger the chance he/she has to access what would otherwise be considered child porn without requiring the net... sometimes looking in the mirror is enough. I'd be more concerned about the child posing in the picture than about a child that might be looking at it. I guess most parents would like to shield their kids from all porn, and not just the more illegal ones.
You can use Visual Studio Express 2005, which is free (as in beer). In fact, according to this page:
G ame-Studio-Express_2C00_-C_2300_-and-Visual-C_2300 _-2005-Express-Edition.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2006/10/10/XNA-
the only version of Visual Studio you can use at the moment is the free one.
Yeah, but more specifically most computers don't know how to deal with integers or real numbers either... Neither 32 bit nor 64 bit signed integers are actual integers... and floating point numbers are certainly neither rational nor real numbers.
But I *KNOW* that Microsoft Word is not transferring whatever I type to Microsoft or other third party (the network traffic would be a giveaway)... and I also *KNOW* that Google keeps the full text (and all revisions) of whatever I write in Google Docs.
Even if they "do no evil", they could be forced by law (or hacking) to release my documents.
Anyway, Google Docs is not a replacement for MS Word (yet, at least)... but rather to Wordpad. It lacks even basic word processor functionality. I still like it and use it, but more in a collaborative "closed wiki" fashion.
Most attachment filters already search inside compressed archives.
I suffer from this all the time, since I'm a developer of custom systems and many times I need to send back and forth executables, scripts (Javascript and such) and DLLs since the customers I work with have SMTP filtering.
Workarounds range from encrypted RAR files to using webmail services (not GMail, which also filters) or sending the attachment through YouSendIt.com.
It IS faster, at some point... because DOS 6.22, Win 3.11 or Win 95 for that matter wouldn't support 64 bit processors, USB 2.0, SATA disks, etc. Installing it in a modern computer would be a huge waste of perfect hardware.
Also, Win95 had much better multitasking than 3.11 (or DOS, which wasn't multitasking at all) so that's "faster" in some sense as well.
Of course newer operating systems are more taxing on resources... but they also can assume the user has a better computer.
Saying an iPOD will be able to store every video ever produced is like saying that eventually will have digital optical discs with enough capacity to hold the whole internet. It misses the point completely. Once upon a time we'd go and buy a good soft repository (like SIMTEL, to name one) in a couple of CDs ... and that would take care of the need to download files off BBSs. Now the internet is more about dynamic content (like Slashdot), and the constant generation of new static content (like new videos uploaded daily to YouTube, new flash animations, etc.). The speed of software distribution makes shareware/freeware CDs pointless, since they can become obsolete in a month.
So, thinking about holding every video in an iPOD sounds to me like thinking of tomorrow technology in today's terms.
We already have video cameras in most modern cell phones, palms, etc. so let me assume the live streaming of HD video, and other new forms of amateur video, will seriously define what YouTube will be like in the future. And holding every single video in existence won't sound so logical.
A couple of years ago I attended a speech by a local (Argentine) OSS developer/evangelist group. One of the guys giving the speech stuck around after the event and a small group of people chatting with him formed.
I approached and listened as he talked about a project they were working on, to bring a full Linux solution for small business... this was a short while after the big economic crisis which devalued our money to a third of its previous value. With Windows licenses going through the roof, this project was more important than ever. They had already chosen a friendly distro, a software suite and were working on a CRM solution based on the leading small-business commercial CRM solution here in Argentina, which was the key component. So far, so good.
He mentioned what percentage of desired functionality they had reached, which wasn't very big... and mentioned the solution wasn't very stable yet. Then he mentioned they developed a new multi platform GUI framework for this project, which was great because it could be ported to all kinds of GUI environments (X, Win32, etc.) On and on he went about how great this was, and how they had implemented all the different widgets and how they had written modules to support different environments and were even working on a module for curses support.
By that point I realized these guys were lost... because even though they knew a good CRM solution was a key selling point, they didn't care much about programming that kind of thing. Apparently they'd rather reinvent the wheel and cook up something that probably would be worse than the many free portable windowing frameworks already available (which they actually didn't need since they wanted to create a full small business linux distro in the first place), and then waste time on the completely irrelevant curses support.
That's a problem I see with OSS, specially in small communities like here in Argentina. A lack of focus or discipline means that a lot of the valuable manpower is wasted. Leadership is important as an inspiration to pursue a path, because programmers will program what they want to program when not on a leash... so it's important that what they want to program is what needs to be programmed.
I wouldn't explain the menu usage to change a font, nor the general use of menus... I'd teach about fonts instead, what they are and how you can change them. Then I'd explain that you can count on any program to let you change font type and size in a mostly straightforward manner which should be easy to find.
An expert user can find out how to change fonts without knowing where the functionality is, and even if you give him a unique GUI... but because he knows it's there and that it's not far away, and that it has to do with text formatting so it's probably somewhere close to the "Bold" and "Italics" option, etc.
Just the other day I told a friend about the "Fill Down" option in Excel, and she was thrilled because she didn't know it... not because it's hard to find, but because she didn't know it was a basic functionality of a spreadsheet. When she needs "Fill Right" (which I didn't tell her about) she'll probably find it quite easily. On the other hand, Google Spreadsheet doesn't have a visibile "Fill Down" option anywhere... but I was counting on it existing (to me it wouldn't make sense to use a spreadsheet without it) so I blindly tried CTRL+D an indeed it worked.
Morale: People will search everywhere for the functionality they know exists, but won't click on the unknown button that's sitting right in front of them without good reason.
Today there are lots of inexperienced computer users who still manage to:
- Use windows.
- Use a browser.
- Use an IM client.
- Use an email client or webmail site.
- Use some social network site, like the complete UI mess that is MySpace, or blogs, photologs, etc.
- Use a p2p client
Just with that basic usage they're exposed to a ton of different widgets, metaphors and procedures Even users who call the little blue icon with the 'e' "The Internet".So, sure... some people will feel lost at first, but I think a complete UI overhaul is much manageable now than it was before the coming of the net.
Read my words a little bit better, and with a little bit of good will (just enough to not assume I'm a complete idiot)... would you? I never stated that americans would be lazy or stupid for not typing accents.
What I DID say is that even among people that SHOULD type the accents (that is, people in spanish speaking countries), it's not consistently done. Some are lazy, some have poor spelling.
I certainly never called you either lazy or stupid, but you managed to state I was both. Nice way of having a healthy discussion...
If you are spanish-speaking (which was my example) not knowing how to place accents is not an excuse. They're a fundamental part of the language, unlike in english where they're only required for foreign words written in their original form.
In Argentina some people have keyboards with spanish language distribution (that is, with extra letters) and some learn the ASCII codes and use the ALT key (along with the code typed in the Numpad) to place accents and the letters Ñ and ñ (which are mandatory as well and can't be replaced by N or n... specially when Año means "year" and Ano means "Anus").
I know of many people that know how to place accents and are just lazy... but I consider that a sign of poor spelling as well, since the best spellers I know use all accents and get a bit of pain every time they find an omission (which normally changes the meaning of the word, makes fluent reading a bit more difficult, and it's just ugly).