There are two ways in which a user can "escape" from your application, namely through the windowmanager and through keyboards shortcuts handled by X or the operating system. Since everybody can choose their own windowmanager, the only solution is to replace it with your application which will then run fullscreen. Exiting the application should logout the user in order to revive their own windowmanager. Many windowmanagers have a --replace option; you should mimic that.
The other escape is VT switching using the CTRL+ALT+Fx keys. This thread provides some startiong points on how to achieve that:
Hope that helps. You'll never get it totally secure as long as the users are using their own accounts; as long as they can run other processes than yours, they can do whatever they want.
Ok can't stop. Ultimately this whole mess was caused by the central European powers that were responsible for the First World War of which now only Germany and France are left as somewhat powerful nations. And they though it would somehow be a great idea to start the Greatest Monetary Experiment Ever (the Euro) and draw in all nations around them. Another great idea of them was to transfer the sovereign power of those nations to a hardly democratic central government in which 23 official languages are spoken. Without consent of their inhabitants, that is. The future is left to the imagination of the reader but let's hope the USA sticks around...
Hint: The US has only been around under 300 years. Have a look at world history before that time. Let me know how great things were.
I guess it would be a bit difficult to distinguish differences between that period and now that are unrelated to the existence of the USA. A better approach to answering your question might be to take a look at what the USA has accomplished recently in the area of peace and war.
1. The USA saved Europe from the nazi assholes. Probably the most world-changing event of recent history. Subsequently they got into a cold war with Russia, which was kind of a pity...
2. The cold war spilled over into Afghanistan (which was communist at the time), resulting in the USA funding the Mujahideen guerilla movement, which ultimately led to the bombing of the twin towers and the invasion of Afghanistan. About the same happened in Vietnam, where the northern communists and the southern democrats were fighting a war and the USA decided to fight along. Fortunately, this has not resulted in things with planes and skyskrapers. Quite the opposite happened: the world was overwhelmed by Vietname loempias:-)
3. Due to ties with Germany, the Iran of the WW2 era was invaded by both the USSR and Brittain, which were after its railroads and oil. When the war was over, Iran became a democratic nation that subsequently took back their oil wells. The USA (supported by the UK) somehow thought it would be a nice idea to overthrow that government in Operation Ajax. This eventually led to the theocratic government of the Iran of today.
4. These events in Iran worried Iraq. These worries eventually resulted in the Iran-Iraq war, in which the USA supported Iraq. This war ended in a tie and it left Iraq with an economic disaster which they tried to compensate by stealing Kuwait. This eventually led to the Iraq war.
So what would the world have looked like without the USA? Europe would probably still be the Third Reich but the Cold War would never have happened and Afghanistan and Iran would have been democracies. So it would have been horrible for Europe - or at least for its civilians - but for the world as a whole it might actually have turned out quite OK. So as far as I'm concerned, it's a tie. However, being a European, I'm quite glad the USA was around to save our ass;-) Also I'm a big fan of Vietnamese food:P The average Afghan, Vietnamese, Iranian or Iraqi person would probably thing otherwise, though.
Everyone always has to mention that so they can display their lack of understanding of the difference between pollution and CO2 production. China is King in the former, not in the latter.
No need for divers, no need to attack it to the sea floor other than using an anchor any ship can just drag it into place. Or back in case maintenance needs to be done.
1. Spot competitor 2. Give competitor money 3. Competitor invests money in feature creep 4. Withdraw funding 5. Competitor dies since it cannot find the resources to maintain the feature creep 6. $profit!
None of these are unique to email. And email does all of these rather bad. Process management software, calendars software, version control software, websites with RSS and stuff like that does all of that So Much Better it is not even funny. Killing email sounds like a good plan to me.
Above 30km/h or so, you typically won't hear a car engine over the sound of the tires on the road. Sound effects will only be heard below that speed. Hybrids aren't going to help against noise pollution at all.
Such sounds are going to be extremely helpful on roads where there's no clear separation between a sidewalk and the road itself. For example offroad or in parking lots.
Just make sure they destroy the "only" copy of the key while searching your home. Problem solved.
A friend of mine had his key stored on his cell phone. When he was arrested for copyright bullshit, the police tossed all his belongings in a box rather roughly. The phone died in the process and it took most of the evidence - encrypted on his harddrive - with it:P
Time passes quicker at higher altitude. When using a clock on the surface to measure the speed of something passing well below you, it will appear to go faster than it actually did. Since the neutrino bean passes underground over several hundred kilometers, somewhere in the middle it'll be several kilometers below the surface.
However, this effect is very small. Anybody around here on/. that has the time to put up a quick ballpark calculation of the expected increase in observer speed due to time dilation affecting the researchers' clock relative to the underground neutrino beam?
Probably this is in the paper since it will most certainly affect their measurements but the paper appears to have been slashdotted... and if it is not we may have the first empirical results to build a new subsurface time contraction theory on, in which case I suggest we call it the Zmooc Theorem:-)
Opt-in? Just like my neighbours should explicitly get my permission to broadcast their fugly SSID into my home!
IMHO broadcasting voids any reasonable expectation of not being noticed. This should not be opt in or opt out or whatever. Anybody is and should always be allowed to receive any radio signals. If you don't want me to receive your radiosignals, keep them to yourself.
Then can I please opt out of my neighbours transmitting their radiowaves into my home?
You are turning things upside down, as is half the world. Just like it is not very common for people to be able to opt out of nearby people hearing them screaming, it is rather difficult for you to opt-out of my antenna receiving the radio signals your radio broadcasts. If you don't want to be heard, don't broadcast. It's that simple.
WTF is this crap doing being modden up?! Is this slashdot? Or did I somehow get lost on the Internet?! There is nothing evil about receiving and decoding radio signals. Keep your radiowaves to yourself if you don't want to be noticed. Just don't broadcast. It's that simple.
It is utterly ridiculous it is somehow considered normal for just about anybody to transmit their filthy radio waves right through my body while listening to them is somehow considered evil. This is so incredibly wrong.
Go Google! Keep up the good work in protecting my rights to use a fucking radio!
As long as you keep believing those bullshit reasons, she's probably not going to get a job indeed because it blocks you from finding out the real reasons she cannot get a job.
Either that or the job culture in Germany is really fucked up, which I don't believe it is. But if it is, she should just try to get a job in the Netherlands. We have more than enough jobs, even those with tits that don't speak our language.
By the way, I find it a bit funny you mention the CS degree; in practice it does not say anything at all about the capabilities of the person... there are at least as many people with a CS degree that are totally incompetent in software engineering as there are people without a CS degree that deliver nothing but quality. It's as funny as it is sad...
OSs don't fail that bad at all. They are simply aimed at another task, namely making processes cooperate. A system designed for that task will never be the best solution for another task that aims to achieve the opposite, namely to make processes completely invisible to each other. Virtualization has nothing to do with OSs failing bad, they're just not designed to make a single piece of hardware look like 20 pieces of hardware you can rent out to 20 different customers.
VMMs therefore are not just operating systems with a rather simple application API; the simplicity of that API is one of their main features.
I use Androids speech recognition extensively. It works while walking, typing does not. It is my default way of googling, even though it misunderstands me all of the time. On average, trying speech first and typing later on is still faster. Also tried Iris, which speaks back like Siri does.
My conclusion: it is not so much speaking to your phone that makes you look stupid - that's what phones were made for in the first place, it's when the phone makes a half-assed attempt of speaking back that you really start to look like a dork.
I grew up with Turbo Pascal 3.01, in fact used only that from 1986 (when I was 9) until 1994 (when I finally got a "proper" PC);-) The idea that the entire development environment could easily fit on a 5.25" floppy was so awesome. Fully integrated, complete, fast, it was just fucking perfect.
Turbo Pascal brings together all the things that make software development awesome. Freedom, power, efficiency, elegancy, completeness. It was the culmination of Software Engineering and that made it a huge factor in me choosing to study Computer Science. Which was a good choice;-)
Unfortunately, there's not much available nowadays that equally elegant and awesome. It's all bloated crap now and the actual hardware it hidden behind an restrictive Operating System. So sad. Tonight, I'm going to dig up a 5.25" drive, find a floppy with Turbo Pascal on it and I'm going to create something awesome.
I think it's a great example. Whatever the slider does does not make it more or less patentable; it is still just a functional description. This should not be patentable unless the patent concerns a very specific technical implementation. And that's not the case (obviously because any implementation would be too obvious to patent).
I totally agree with what he says. However, he misses the point that's called reality.
Problems that could easily be solved in hardware, would require a description of this hardware. A transistor here, a flywheel there and a plate of metal here in order to achieve X. It's that description that is then patented, not its functional result. Alternative implementations would then not be covered by the patent so anybody that finds a way to achieve X with a piece of plastic instead of metal should not be bothered by it.
That's not what we see in software patent land today; instead of the technical design, the functional result is patented. There are a million ways to implement slide-to-unlock and somehow Apple has a patent on all of them. That's odd, since most of these million ways have nothing to do with the original research Apple has done in order to obtain the patent.
If the same standards for granting a hardware patent would be applied to software patents, I could probably live with them (since in that case there would hardly be any software patents). Now I cannot, especially not when selling software in the USA.
Also, mathematical formulas cannot be patented. Therefore the comparison with mathematics is moot. What can be patented, is the practical use of that specific formula. Also note, the patent Marty Goetz was granted was not a software patent in the sense that we think of it today; his patent was valid ONLY when used on a machine using two tape reels. A pure software implementation would NOT have been patentable. Therefore using this patent as an example of a software patent is misleading; it is not a software patent, it is a regular patent that has part of the solution implemented in software.
"There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them."
When I upgrade, I just want shit to work. I like it to look really slick, but I need my computer to do stuff more than I need it to look cool. It has worked just fine for many years and has looked awesomely cool causing people that see it for the first time to make "wow"-like sounds. Now I upgrade, notice my transparent Compiz Cube is gone (which is a fucking great productivity tool, allowing me to keep an eye on all my virtual desktops through my transparent terminals), notice my shortcut keys to switch desktops no longer work and can no longer be configured at all. I could hardly do anything without touching the mouse. Re-enabling the Compiz Cube gives me a message that the Compiz Unity Plugin needs to be disabled since it conflicts with the cube. Fine, click OK, end of working desktop. Unacceptable. I'm back to Debian.
Or so I thought. The next thing I tried, was to upgrade my Debian box. The result was even worse. X no longer starts. Most video codecs are missing. And when I finally get X running, I get Gnome 3. Well, if you thought Unity was bad, wait until you see this. Focus follows mouse is half broken and in order to configure the panel, you need to click alt + right mouse button. However, out of the box, it does not recognize alt as alt. After an hour of fiddling with the gnome layout options and xmodmap, I gave up, grabbed my Android Phone and enjoyed how it Just Works.
My much less computer-savvy girlfriend has no problem at all with Unity or Ubuntu in general. In general, it Just Works. She would have a problem with X not working after an upgrade or with the braindead new Gnome 3. So, yes, we can be angry at Canonical for not respecting its users and the features they use, but at least their shit works out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two ways in which a user can "escape" from your application, namely through the windowmanager and through keyboards shortcuts handled by X or the operating system. Since everybody can choose their own windowmanager, the only solution is to replace it with your application which will then run fullscreen. Exiting the application should logout the user in order to revive their own windowmanager. Many windowmanagers have a --replace option; you should mimic that.
The other escape is VT switching using the CTRL+ALT+Fx keys. This thread provides some startiong points on how to achieve that:
http://old.nabble.com/How-to-disable-ctrl-alt-Fn--td14994350.html
Hope that helps. You'll never get it totally secure as long as the users are using their own accounts; as long as they can run other processes than yours, they can do whatever they want.
EmpeLOL;]
Ok can't stop. Ultimately this whole mess was caused by the central European powers that were responsible for the First World War of which now only Germany and France are left as somewhat powerful nations. And they though it would somehow be a great idea to start the Greatest Monetary Experiment Ever (the Euro) and draw in all nations around them. Another great idea of them was to transfer the sovereign power of those nations to a hardly democratic central government in which 23 official languages are spoken. Without consent of their inhabitants, that is. The future is left to the imagination of the reader but let's hope the USA sticks around ...
Hint: The US has only been around under 300 years. Have a look at world history before that time. Let me know how great things were.
I guess it would be a bit difficult to distinguish differences between that period and now that are unrelated to the existence of the USA. A better approach to answering your question might be to take a look at what the USA has accomplished recently in the area of peace and war.
1. The USA saved Europe from the nazi assholes. Probably the most world-changing event of recent history. Subsequently they got into a cold war with Russia, which was kind of a pity ...
2. The cold war spilled over into Afghanistan (which was communist at the time), resulting in the USA funding the Mujahideen guerilla movement, which ultimately led to the bombing of the twin towers and the invasion of Afghanistan. About the same happened in Vietnam, where the northern communists and the southern democrats were fighting a war and the USA decided to fight along. Fortunately, this has not resulted in things with planes and skyskrapers. Quite the opposite happened: the world was overwhelmed by Vietname loempias:-)
3. Due to ties with Germany, the Iran of the WW2 era was invaded by both the USSR and Brittain, which were after its railroads and oil. When the war was over, Iran became a democratic nation that subsequently took back their oil wells. The USA (supported by the UK) somehow thought it would be a nice idea to overthrow that government in Operation Ajax. This eventually led to the theocratic government of the Iran of today.
4. These events in Iran worried Iraq. These worries eventually resulted in the Iran-Iraq war, in which the USA supported Iraq. This war ended in a tie and it left Iraq with an economic disaster which they tried to compensate by stealing Kuwait. This eventually led to the Iraq war.
So what would the world have looked like without the USA? Europe would probably still be the Third Reich but the Cold War would never have happened and Afghanistan and Iran would have been democracies. So it would have been horrible for Europe - or at least for its civilians - but for the world as a whole it might actually have turned out quite OK. So as far as I'm concerned, it's a tie. However, being a European, I'm quite glad the USA was around to save our ass;-) Also I'm a big fan of Vietnamese food:P The average Afghan, Vietnamese, Iranian or Iraqi person would probably thing otherwise, though.
Everyone always has to mention that so they can display their lack of understanding of the difference between pollution and CO2 production. China is King in the former, not in the latter.
Seems rather complicated compared to the vast amount of other approaches to harvesting wave energy. This one, for example, is so much simpler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYEQaU_1Ak0
No need for divers, no need to attack it to the sea floor other than using an anchor any ship can just drag it into place. Or back in case maintenance needs to be done.
1. Spot competitor
2. Give competitor money
3. Competitor invests money in feature creep
4. Withdraw funding
5. Competitor dies since it cannot find the resources to maintain the feature creep
6. $profit!
None of these are unique to email. And email does all of these rather bad. Process management software, calendars software, version control software, websites with RSS and stuff like that does all of that So Much Better it is not even funny. Killing email sounds like a good plan to me.
Wave up :P
Wave down
Wave up
Wave down
etc.
Above 30km/h or so, you typically won't hear a car engine over the sound of the tires on the road. Sound effects will only be heard below that speed. Hybrids aren't going to help against noise pollution at all.
Such sounds are going to be extremely helpful on roads where there's no clear separation between a sidewalk and the road itself. For example offroad or in parking lots.
Just make sure they destroy the "only" copy of the key while searching your home. Problem solved.
A friend of mine had his key stored on his cell phone. When he was arrested for copyright bullshit, the police tossed all his belongings in a box rather roughly. The phone died in the process and it took most of the evidence - encrypted on his harddrive - with it :P
Time passes quicker at higher altitude. When using a clock on the surface to measure the speed of something passing well below you, it will appear to go faster than it actually did. Since the neutrino bean passes underground over several hundred kilometers, somewhere in the middle it'll be several kilometers below the surface.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1314656/Scientists-prove-time-really-does-pass-quicker-higher-altitude.html
However, this effect is very small. Anybody around here on /. that has the time to put up a quick ballpark calculation of the expected increase in observer speed due to time dilation affecting the researchers' clock relative to the underground neutrino beam?
Probably this is in the paper since it will most certainly affect their measurements but the paper appears to have been slashdotted... and if it is not we may have the first empirical results to build a new subsurface time contraction theory on, in which case I suggest we call it the Zmooc Theorem:-)
How about just not going outside? Remote controlled robots are probably much more comfortable than a space suit anyway.
You may not be broadcasting it in wifi protocol terms, but in my world any radiowave leaving your accesspoint is being broadcasted.
Opt-in? Just like my neighbours should explicitly get my permission to broadcast their fugly SSID into my home!
IMHO broadcasting voids any reasonable expectation of not being noticed. This should not be opt in or opt out or whatever. Anybody is and should always be allowed to receive any radio signals. If you don't want me to receive your radiosignals, keep them to yourself.
Then can I please opt out of my neighbours transmitting their radiowaves into my home?
You are turning things upside down, as is half the world. Just like it is not very common for people to be able to opt out of nearby people hearing them screaming, it is rather difficult for you to opt-out of my antenna receiving the radio signals your radio broadcasts. If you don't want to be heard, don't broadcast. It's that simple.
WTF is this crap doing being modden up?! Is this slashdot? Or did I somehow get lost on the Internet?! There is nothing evil about receiving and decoding radio signals. Keep your radiowaves to yourself if you don't want to be noticed. Just don't broadcast. It's that simple.
It is utterly ridiculous it is somehow considered normal for just about anybody to transmit their filthy radio waves right through my body while listening to them is somehow considered evil. This is so incredibly wrong.
Go Google! Keep up the good work in protecting my rights to use a fucking radio!
As long as you keep believing those bullshit reasons, she's probably not going to get a job indeed because it blocks you from finding out the real reasons she cannot get a job.
Either that or the job culture in Germany is really fucked up, which I don't believe it is. But if it is, she should just try to get a job in the Netherlands. We have more than enough jobs, even those with tits that don't speak our language.
By the way, I find it a bit funny you mention the CS degree; in practice it does not say anything at all about the capabilities of the person... there are at least as many people with a CS degree that are totally incompetent in software engineering as there are people without a CS degree that deliver nothing but quality. It's as funny as it is sad...
OSs don't fail that bad at all. They are simply aimed at another task, namely making processes cooperate. A system designed for that task will never be the best solution for another task that aims to achieve the opposite, namely to make processes completely invisible to each other. Virtualization has nothing to do with OSs failing bad, they're just not designed to make a single piece of hardware look like 20 pieces of hardware you can rent out to 20 different customers.
VMMs therefore are not just operating systems with a rather simple application API; the simplicity of that API is one of their main features.
A natural gas plant? So sad.
An unfinished fast breeder reactor near where I live was turned into an amusement park;-)
http://www.wunderlandkalkar.eu/en/
I use Androids speech recognition extensively. It works while walking, typing does not. It is my default way of googling, even though it misunderstands me all of the time. On average, trying speech first and typing later on is still faster. Also tried Iris, which speaks back like Siri does.
My conclusion: it is not so much speaking to your phone that makes you look stupid - that's what phones were made for in the first place, it's when the phone makes a half-assed attempt of speaking back that you really start to look like a dork.
I grew up with Turbo Pascal 3.01, in fact used only that from 1986 (when I was 9) until 1994 (when I finally got a "proper" PC);-) The idea that the entire development environment could easily fit on a 5.25" floppy was so awesome. Fully integrated, complete, fast, it was just fucking perfect.
Turbo Pascal brings together all the things that make software development awesome. Freedom, power, efficiency, elegancy, completeness. It was the culmination of Software Engineering and that made it a huge factor in me choosing to study Computer Science. Which was a good choice;-)
Unfortunately, there's not much available nowadays that equally elegant and awesome. It's all bloated crap now and the actual hardware it hidden behind an restrictive Operating System. So sad. Tonight, I'm going to dig up a 5.25" drive, find a floppy with Turbo Pascal on it and I'm going to create something awesome.
^KD
I think it's a great example. Whatever the slider does does not make it more or less patentable; it is still just a functional description. This should not be patentable unless the patent concerns a very specific technical implementation. And that's not the case (obviously because any implementation would be too obvious to patent).
For these kins of things, we have copyright laws.
I totally agree with what he says. However, he misses the point that's called reality.
Problems that could easily be solved in hardware, would require a description of this hardware. A transistor here, a flywheel there and a plate of metal here in order to achieve X. It's that description that is then patented, not its functional result. Alternative implementations would then not be covered by the patent so anybody that finds a way to achieve X with a piece of plastic instead of metal should not be bothered by it.
That's not what we see in software patent land today; instead of the technical design, the functional result is patented. There are a million ways to implement slide-to-unlock and somehow Apple has a patent on all of them. That's odd, since most of these million ways have nothing to do with the original research Apple has done in order to obtain the patent.
If the same standards for granting a hardware patent would be applied to software patents, I could probably live with them (since in that case there would hardly be any software patents). Now I cannot, especially not when selling software in the USA.
Also, mathematical formulas cannot be patented. Therefore the comparison with mathematics is moot. What can be patented, is the practical use of that specific formula. Also note, the patent Marty Goetz was granted was not a software patent in the sense that we think of it today; his patent was valid ONLY when used on a machine using two tape reels. A pure software implementation would NOT have been patentable. Therefore using this patent as an example of a software patent is misleading; it is not a software patent, it is a regular patent that has part of the solution implemented in software.
"There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them."
When I upgrade, I just want shit to work. I like it to look really slick, but I need my computer to do stuff more than I need it to look cool. It has worked just fine for many years and has looked awesomely cool causing people that see it for the first time to make "wow"-like sounds. Now I upgrade, notice my transparent Compiz Cube is gone (which is a fucking great productivity tool, allowing me to keep an eye on all my virtual desktops through my transparent terminals), notice my shortcut keys to switch desktops no longer work and can no longer be configured at all. I could hardly do anything without touching the mouse. Re-enabling the Compiz Cube gives me a message that the Compiz Unity Plugin needs to be disabled since it conflicts with the cube. Fine, click OK, end of working desktop. Unacceptable. I'm back to Debian.
Or so I thought. The next thing I tried, was to upgrade my Debian box. The result was even worse. X no longer starts. Most video codecs are missing. And when I finally get X running, I get Gnome 3. Well, if you thought Unity was bad, wait until you see this. Focus follows mouse is half broken and in order to configure the panel, you need to click alt + right mouse button. However, out of the box, it does not recognize alt as alt. After an hour of fiddling with the gnome layout options and xmodmap, I gave up, grabbed my Android Phone and enjoyed how it Just Works.
My much less computer-savvy girlfriend has no problem at all with Unity or Ubuntu in general. In general, it Just Works. She would have a problem with X not working after an upgrade or with the braindead new Gnome 3. So, yes, we can be angry at Canonical for not respecting its users and the features they use, but at least their shit works out of the box.