The big mistake they made with tabbed browsing is changing the hotkeys. Now that Mozilla, and Mozilla-based products have become so common, many of us are used to using:
cntl-T to open a tab.
cntl-W to close a tab.
Why is it that all the responses to this story are Funny and there are no Insightful or Interesting responses ?
Does this show the/. mentality ?
I don't think it says anything about the/. mentality.
Summary of article
Some researchers who are in desparate need of grant money were playing with a "Play-doh barbershop kit", and thought to themselves "Hey, if we prentend to do this for real, we might get money!"
So they spent gobs of "doh", and built something that almost looks like a prototype to something that may be feasible to build thousands of years from now. Optimistically, if Moore's law holds, we may have the equipment to make this work sometime within the next thousand years.
One guy in the article grossly understated how important an invention like this was, by saying "We could be as famous as Gutenberg!" Something tells me that in the year 3117, when they finally get this to work, the guy who will be credited with the breakthrough will still be living, unlike these fools.
As someone else pointed out, it almost reads like an onion story.
Anyone who takes this story seriously should be modded down as -1 gullible. 90% of the people reading these comments clicked on the story because they wanted some good laughs.
Tell me again how one puts a "virus-worm hybrid" into a non-executable file and have it infect mp3 players on multiple platforms?
Probably with similair bugs in the programs. Remember the buffer overflow bug that existed in both WinAmp and WinXP? A single infected mp3 or wma file could take either application.
The fact that XP goes and reads the ID3 tags on every mp3 file was just icing on the cake. You know, there was a time where users got to decide which files should be opened, not the OS.
This supposed worm disables functions of a computer. Therefore, it is malicious, as is anything that modifies system performance without the user's knowledge and consent.
It's also illegal to snoop into other people's files. Just because it is sitting in an open file share doesn't mean that it's legal for you to copy it. If you take it, and then use it, you are consenting to anything it would do to you.
Using that same logic, I don't think they'll have much trouble defending themselves in court.
Comparison to Timex pager-watch
on
Assorted CES Gizmos
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If I understand the concept correctly, these watches are only receiving data, not sending.
It's hard to say. The news clip doesn't say much.
My watch (see it here) can send and receive pages, although typing on it involves a whole lot of keystrokes(!).
I know I'm bordering on almost an ad here, but I think the watch is really a great deal. $50, includes one year of skytel service, and a voicemail box.
Once you get it, go to mobile.yahoo.com, and click on the alerts tab. It's pretty easy to customize it for weather, stock, news, and sports alerts. I normally don't like dinner interruptions, but 15 seconds to read the Illini score at half-time is well worth it. I suppose there are non-entertainment purposes for the pager too, but I haven't used them yet!
If you're a bargain shopper, you might want to wait. The regular price on these has been as low as $40 before, and I got mine for $32.50 using a coupon code (which is now expired). Watch your favorite bargain hunting page for new coupon codes.
And for those that finish it, and are looking for more classic bad sci-fi, you should check out some of the movies made by Ed Wood.
You can probably find Plan 9 from Outer Space at your local video store. It involves aliens who resurrect our dead, and use the zombies to get our attention. You can find the DVD for $10 now at Amazon
There's also Bride and the Beast. Here, a woman falls into a deadly perversion also - interest in her new husband's gorilla!!! Bwwaahaahaa!
And to think, when I first saw this slashdot story, I thought it was a serious review!
Checks and money orders, but I wait until they clear before they ship.
As others said, it was a cashier's check. Normally there's no reason to wait for a cashier's check to clear.
From the article:
I called Sgt. Knapp at 2:45. He told me he was on his way back to the house. They'd already made the delivery and arrested the guy. He had more than $10,000 in counterfeit cashier's checks waiting for deliveries.
bsdwebhosting.net has cheap rates:
$2/GB traffic
$.50/GB/day storage
$.15/minute CPU time (for scripts)
It's easy to track your usage through their website, and create multiple accounts with different privilidges. For any site with less than 100 visitors a day, this is perfect, because
there's no monthly charge. I've maintained my church's website for 6 months there, and haven't exceeded $.15 yet.
nearlyfreespeech.com
is cheaper, but they don't allow ssh (or telnet) access. This is a big downside for those of us who enjoy unix because of it's user interface;)
Unfortunately, I can't help you if you need more bandwith than those guys can give. Good luck!
That said, what's so bad about LaTeX? Your comment makes it sound like LaTeX kinda sucks; is that the case?
LaTeX is better than any other open standard out there, but good luck getting it to embed a spreadsheet in page 14 of a document. It's good, but it's basic. Word processors/database/spreadsheet programs have progressed far beyond what LaTeX can do.
And, LaTeX has far more plans out there, but they just can't get the staff to advance. If you have hours available, it's a very good project to join. Once they (finally) get to version 3, they'll be in a better position to decide where to go next.
No, I don't think MS is going to do anything that awful, but realize that XML is not magic. It does nothing by itself to make a document more open. ... You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Read the first line of the press release:
Members of the OASIS standards consortium have formed a technical committee to advance an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
Obviously if everyone just "agrees to use XML", then we've accomplished nothing. But, how I translate "an open, XML-based file format specification". It sounds like they're planning to create a DTD that everyone would agree to use.
Of course, the DTD won't cover everything that Corel (or someone else) needs, but it will be a lot more extensive then LaTeX. I'm sure that each manufacturer will have another "DTD" file to cover the few proprietary tags they'll have (kind of like MS has its own propietary html tags, i.e. "marquee"). But the vast majority of features in every wordprocessor app will be functional across other wordprocessor apps, with no extra work for developers. This is a good thing.
Now that I think about it, LaTeX is really a very good analagy. The concept behind LaTeX was right, but they started on the wrong foot, and had trouble recruiting the manpower needed to develop it for modern documents. This is a start-from scratch structured text formatting and typesetting standard. It's based on XML, soley because it's a recognizable buzzword.
I thought this was last year... Or was there another meteor shower?
You're mistaken. That was the leonid shower of 2001 that rotates 33 years.
The truth is that there are 33 different leonid showers in the family, each of which peak every 33 years.
Although this leonid shower may be greatest show within 33 years for any leonid shower on this rotation, it's really meaningless. It's the greatest of all within the set, and the number of elements in the set is one.
But the fact is, I *like* the email client, and web page composer.
Ewww grosss. Get away from me.
How could you possible admit to preferring either of those over vi?
Once the mozilla email client lets me choose what editor to use (like mutt has for years), I'll consider using it.
The same thing applies to their html editor. I will never subject myself to preforming menial tasks (like changing height and width values on 926 images by hand) again.
One of the strong points of Open Source software is the value of choice. Mozilla needs to allow different choices of editors before it becomes my browser of choice. Vote for this bug!!
Bringing it back on topic: Phoenix will be popular to many geeks who use vi, simply because all the "broken" editor parts of Mozilla are removed. But, chopping off functionality just treats the symptoms. Fixing bug 8589 is the solution.
The headline should be corrected to read: In lieu of fixing Mozilla bug 8589, Phoenix 0.3 is released.
Brownie points if you can mirror the Google mirror
on
Google Does the News
·
· Score: 5, Funny
What if Google links to this story? Then you get the Slashdot slashdotting Google, who will slashdot Slashdot, who will bounce it to Google, who will...
Surely "How much does this sound like the original?" is a better test than "Which sounds best?"
This would definately apply if the music samples were country music.
Which ever encoding technique lowered the amplitude of the sound waves the best would probably get my vote as the best. Well, unless one was able to turn the whole stream to static. That would, undeniably be the best compression scheme for today's country music.
I actually bought and used a IPAQ for awhile. The only time I'd boot my computer into Windows was so that I could sync with my PDA. For some reason, I couldn't mount it as a drive in linux. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that the reason was the immaturity of USB hard drive drivers in linux, but let's not go there!)
As nice as ActiveSync first appeared to be, I realized that it was slow because it did a million things I didn't want it to do, and yet it still wasn't as powerful as a ftp&telnet combination would be.
I'll start looking into buying a replacement PDA pretty soon (as soon as I get my finances back in order), and will definately be looking for something that has a linux backbone. And, no matter how "great" the syncing software is, I'll never install it. I'd much rather develop scripts that can transfer files from each directory as I choose, according to the rules I develop in the script.
Anything other than ftp/telnet/drive mounting is uncivilized.
Re:Explaining the format of my post...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
Submission had rules
for all comments submitted.
They, I must defy.
Two-minute limit
keeps some from fixing haiku.
What a lame, dumb rule.
Explaining the format of my post...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
Submission had rules
for all comments submitted.
They, I must defy.
Re:So Habeas decides who's allowed to spam.
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
So Habeas decides who's allowed to spam.
Actually, it's far lamer than that. They just write a procmail script for you that only allows in mail with their unique header. The copyright part is just a dumb trick to catch any spammers who have found ways to send email from your friend's email addresses.
Anyone who's thinking of signing up for this should consider doing it themselves. First, just allow email from only the addressees you allow in your.procmailrc file.
If you get any more spam, it will be from a spammer who faked your Aunt Rose's "from address". I seriously doubt this will ever happen. If it does, just change your.procmailrc to only allow mail from Aunt Rose if it contains the phrase "rubber baby buggy bumpers".
If, finally that fails, and somehow spammers figure out the passphrase that you're using, then you can start to consider using a copyrighted poem as the passphrase.
This idea is not new. Plenty of people have thought of it before. It's just useful. It's equivalent to inventing a special steering-wheel lock that keeps zebras from stealing your car.
No one can just hand me a disk of the Angel episode I missed last week or something.
If you had a TiVo, you wouldn't have missed it.
I unintentionally miss programs all the time, even when my PVR is setup correctly!
That darn stuff outside called "weather" keeps on messing up my satellite signal.
And now someone's trying to beat you down 'cause it's Offtopic (it'll grow back)
And, I suppose this message will be hit too. Oh well. Karma is cheap nowdays!
I've always thought the decision to have "off-topic" count as negative was bad. Anyone who reads many newsgroups knows that the best threads usually start hidden inside another unrelated thread!
It is my duty, then, to inform all who can read this, that you can change which mods are positives, and which are negatives. I finally decided to make "off-topic" a +1 for when I'm reading about 2 months ago. I've been extremely pleased with the selection of posts it brings up to the surface! Everyone should at least try it sometime.
The average computer user doesn't understand there is anything more to an OS than a blue desktop and a few icons. The average computer user finds zips hard enough to understand, let alone tarballs. The average computer can't figure out how to uninstall a piece of software unless there is an "uninstall" icon in that program's Star Menu group. The average user can't understand Window's directory stucture. The average user can't understand the difference between an.exe file and a.png.
I have evidence that such assumptions aren't always right. That evidence is me.
I played with computers a little as a kid, and never was interested in them. I learned DOS on a 386, and was turned off by how "klunky" it was.
As a college freshman, I was reintroduced to the MS world. Things had changed a lot. Now documents were represented by icons, just like the old macs had done. Still, I couldn't grasp the concepts needed to become a "power user", or whatever the term was for people that wrote the programs everyone else used.
My Junior year ('97), I transfered to the UofI, and was introduced to something called "Unix" for the first time, since student's email accounts were unix accounts. I met someone who had actually installed this thing called linux, about 8 months later.
Soon, I had learned a lot. I made perl scripts for simple file manipulation, and eventually came to install linux on my PC. I learned that the "I don't get along with computers" line was wrong. I just didn't get along with MS-centric interfaces.
I imagine there are many more people out there who are as confused as I was. They may look dumb, but it might just be that they are the type of people who prefer to see every application as a filter, that handles standard input, and generates standard output. That way, people who have different opinions about user interface can still use the same core programs!
Once this notion "clicks" with the general public, they may realize that the only thing holding them back before was an un-intuitive interface. And then you see a total blundering fool (like the 1997 me) turn around.
I am currently helping a co-worker who is curious about Linux learn her way around on one of the spare machines here. Her first question (w/ RH 7.3 default) was that even after 10 minutes of poking at stuff she could not find the taskbar buried in with all that other stuff. That was just the beginning.
<persuasionspeech option=prolinux>
Of course, that's user experience of someone who has probably been brought up using Windows. Of course, it won't be as easy to use for her.
I just built a dual-boot system for my Aunt, Uncle, and three cousins. None of them have ever touched a computer for more than an hour in their life.
I showed my cousins (girls ages 8, 10, and 12) how to use Windows, and then how to use linux. When I showed them how to browse from their home directory up two levels, and into the mounted windows partition, their first question was why they couldn't do the same thing from Windows! Youngsters are bright, and pick up these things very quickly!
Before long, they had found ways to change their background (in KDE), to a background from the/dos1/windows directory, on their own! They never hit the "taskbar hiccup" you're referring to.
The ten year old quickly decided that she was going to use gnome. Her reason? She liked using the "Cool: sunglasses" icon overlay for her documents, available with about 7 others by right clicking, and choosing properties on any icon. I didn't even know such stuff was in there!
When newbies grab onto linux over windows because of eye candy, you can tell that the balance is getting ready to shift. Will it be far enough for us to feel it? I think I can finally answer that with a "likely".
</persuasionspeech>
Slashdot Mirror
cntl-T to open a tab.
cntl-W to close a tab.
Why does konqueror have to use something different?
Does this show the /. mentality ?
I don't think it says anything about the /. mentality.
Summary of article
As someone else pointed out, it almost reads like an onion story.Anyone who takes this story seriously should be modded down as -1 gullible. 90% of the people reading these comments clicked on the story because they wanted some good laughs.
Probably with similair bugs in the programs. Remember the buffer overflow bug that existed in both WinAmp and WinXP? A single infected mp3 or wma file could take either application.
The fact that XP goes and reads the ID3 tags on every mp3 file was just icing on the cake. You know, there was a time where users got to decide which files should be opened, not the OS.
Article here
It's also illegal to snoop into other people's files. Just because it is sitting in an open file share doesn't mean that it's legal for you to copy it. If you take it, and then use it, you are consenting to anything it would do to you.
Using that same logic, I don't think they'll have much trouble defending themselves in court.
It's hard to say. The news clip doesn't say much.
My watch (see it here) can send and receive pages, although typing on it involves a whole lot of keystrokes(!).
I know I'm bordering on almost an ad here, but I think the watch is really a great deal. $50, includes one year of skytel service, and a voicemail box.
Once you get it, go to mobile.yahoo.com, and click on the alerts tab. It's pretty easy to customize it for weather, stock, news, and sports alerts. I normally don't like dinner interruptions, but 15 seconds to read the Illini score at half-time is well worth it. I suppose there are non-entertainment purposes for the pager too, but I haven't used them yet!
If you're a bargain shopper, you might want to wait. The regular price on these has been as low as $40 before, and I got mine for $32.50 using a coupon code (which is now expired). Watch your favorite bargain hunting page for new coupon codes.
You can probably find Plan 9 from Outer Space at your local video store. It involves aliens who resurrect our dead, and use the zombies to get our attention. You can find the DVD for $10 now at Amazon
There's also Bride and the Beast. Here, a woman falls into a deadly perversion also - interest in her new husband's gorilla!!! Bwwaahaahaa!
And to think, when I first saw this slashdot story, I thought it was a serious review!
As others said, it was a cashier's check. Normally there's no reason to wait for a cashier's check to clear.
From the article:
Find one that looks adequate for your needs, then ask about it on webhostingtalk.com, to make sure it's reputable.
$2/GB traffic
$.50/GB/day storage
$.15/minute CPU time (for scripts)
It's easy to track your usage through their website, and create multiple accounts with different privilidges. For any site with less than 100 visitors a day, this is perfect, because there's no monthly charge. I've maintained my church's website for 6 months there, and haven't exceeded $.15 yet.
nearlyfreespeech.com is cheaper, but they don't allow ssh (or telnet) access. This is a big downside for those of us who enjoy unix because of it's user interface ;)
Unfortunately, I can't help you if you need more bandwith than those guys can give. Good luck!
LaTeX is better than any other open standard out there, but good luck getting it to embed a spreadsheet in page 14 of a document. It's good, but it's basic. Word processors/database/spreadsheet programs have progressed far beyond what LaTeX can do.
And, LaTeX has far more plans out there, but they just can't get the staff to advance. If you have hours available, it's a very good project to join. Once they (finally) get to version 3, they'll be in a better position to decide where to go next.
LaTeX status
...
You can have utterly meaningless tags with random data in it. If you don't have agreements on what fields actually mean then all you have is content without value. Yay.
Read the first line of the press release:
Obviously if everyone just "agrees to use XML", then we've accomplished nothing. But, how I translate "an open, XML-based file format specification". It sounds like they're planning to create a DTD that everyone would agree to use.Of course, the DTD won't cover everything that Corel (or someone else) needs, but it will be a lot more extensive then LaTeX. I'm sure that each manufacturer will have another "DTD" file to cover the few proprietary tags they'll have (kind of like MS has its own propietary html tags, i.e. "marquee"). But the vast majority of features in every wordprocessor app will be functional across other wordprocessor apps, with no extra work for developers. This is a good thing.
Now that I think about it, LaTeX is really a very good analagy. The concept behind LaTeX was right, but they started on the wrong foot, and had trouble recruiting the manpower needed to develop it for modern documents. This is a start-from scratch structured text formatting and typesetting standard. It's based on XML, soley because it's a recognizable buzzword.
You're mistaken. That was the leonid shower of 2001 that rotates 33 years.
The truth is that there are 33 different leonid showers in the family, each of which peak every 33 years.
Although this leonid shower may be greatest show within 33 years for any leonid shower on this rotation, it's really meaningless. It's the greatest of all within the set, and the number of elements in the set is one.
Ewww grosss. Get away from me.
How could you possible admit to preferring either of those over vi?
Once the mozilla email client lets me choose what editor to use (like mutt has for years), I'll consider using it.
The same thing applies to their html editor. I will never subject myself to preforming menial tasks (like changing height and width values on 926 images by hand) again.
One of the strong points of Open Source software is the value of choice. Mozilla needs to allow different choices of editors before it becomes my browser of choice. Vote for this bug!!
Bringing it back on topic: Phoenix will be popular to many geeks who use vi, simply because all the "broken" editor parts of Mozilla are removed. But, chopping off functionality just treats the symptoms. Fixing bug 8589 is the solution.
The headline should be corrected to read:
In lieu of fixing Mozilla bug 8589, Phoenix 0.3 is released.
I just want to see a google archive of this:
http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
This would definately apply if the music samples were country music.
Which ever encoding technique lowered the amplitude of the sound waves the best would probably get my vote as the best.
Well, unless one was able to turn the whole stream to static. That would, undeniably be the best compression scheme for today's country music.
I actually bought and used a IPAQ for awhile. The only time I'd boot my computer into Windows was so that I could sync with my PDA. For some reason, I couldn't mount it as a drive in linux. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that the reason was the immaturity of USB hard drive drivers in linux, but let's not go there!)
As nice as ActiveSync first appeared to be, I realized that it was slow because it did a million things I didn't want it to do, and yet it still wasn't as powerful as a ftp&telnet combination would be.
I'll start looking into buying a replacement PDA pretty soon (as soon as I get my finances back in order), and will definately be looking for something that has a linux backbone. And, no matter how "great" the syncing software is, I'll never install it. I'd much rather develop scripts that can transfer files from each directory as I choose, according to the rules I develop in the script.
Anything other than ftp/telnet/drive mounting is uncivilized.
for all comments submitted.
They, I must defy.
Two-minute limit
keeps some from fixing haiku.
What a lame, dumb rule.
Submission had rules for all comments submitted. They, I must defy.
Actually, it's far lamer than that. They just write a procmail script for you that only allows in mail with their unique header. The copyright part is just a dumb trick to catch any spammers who have found ways to send email from your friend's email addresses.
Anyone who's thinking of signing up for this should consider doing it themselves. First, just allow email from only the addressees you allow in your .procmailrc file.
If you get any more spam, it will be from a spammer who faked your Aunt Rose's "from address". I seriously doubt this will ever happen. If it does, just change your .procmailrc to only allow mail from Aunt Rose if it contains the phrase "rubber baby buggy bumpers".
If, finally that fails, and somehow spammers figure out the passphrase that you're using, then you can start to consider using a copyrighted poem as the passphrase.
This idea is not new. Plenty of people have thought of it before. It's just useful. It's equivalent to inventing a special steering-wheel lock that keeps zebras from stealing your car.
So, the have people capable, but no facilities for it, how is a satellite connection with an experienced doctor in Boston going to help?
searching for reviewuate on google brings up lots of results too!
I unintentionally miss programs all the time, even when my PVR is setup correctly!
That darn stuff outside called "weather" keeps on messing up my satellite signal.
And, I suppose this message will be hit too. Oh well. Karma is cheap nowdays!
I've always thought the decision to have "off-topic" count as negative was bad. Anyone who reads many newsgroups knows that the best threads usually start hidden inside another unrelated thread!
It is my duty, then, to inform all who can read this, that you can change which mods are positives, and which are negatives. I finally decided to make "off-topic" a +1 for when I'm reading about 2 months ago. I've been extremely pleased with the selection of posts it brings up to the surface! Everyone should at least try it sometime.
I have evidence that such assumptions aren't always right. That evidence is me.
I played with computers a little as a kid, and never was interested in them. I learned DOS on a 386, and was turned off by how "klunky" it was.
As a college freshman, I was reintroduced to the MS world. Things had changed a lot. Now documents were represented by icons, just like the old macs had done. Still, I couldn't grasp the concepts needed to become a "power user", or whatever the term was for people that wrote the programs everyone else used.
My Junior year ('97), I transfered to the UofI, and was introduced to something called "Unix" for the first time, since student's email accounts were unix accounts. I met someone who had actually installed this thing called linux, about 8 months later.
Soon, I had learned a lot. I made perl scripts for simple file manipulation, and eventually came to install linux on my PC. I learned that the "I don't get along with computers" line was wrong. I just didn't get along with MS-centric interfaces.
I imagine there are many more people out there who are as confused as I was. They may look dumb, but it might just be that they are the type of people who prefer to see every application as a filter, that handles standard input, and generates standard output. That way, people who have different opinions about user interface can still use the same core programs!
Once this notion "clicks" with the general public, they may realize that the only thing holding them back before was an un-intuitive interface. And then you see a total blundering fool (like the 1997 me) turn around.
<persuasionspeech option=prolinux>
Of course, that's user experience of someone who has probably been brought up using Windows. Of course, it won't be as easy to use for her.
I just built a dual-boot system for my Aunt, Uncle, and three cousins. None of them have ever touched a computer for more than an hour in their life.
I showed my cousins (girls ages 8, 10, and 12) how to use Windows, and then how to use linux. When I showed them how to browse from their home directory up two levels, and into the mounted windows partition, their first question was why they couldn't do the same thing from Windows! Youngsters are bright, and pick up these things very quickly!
Before long, they had found ways to change their background (in KDE), to a background from the /dos1/windows directory, on their own! They never hit the "taskbar hiccup" you're referring to.
The ten year old quickly decided that she was going to use gnome. Her reason? She liked using the "Cool: sunglasses" icon overlay for her documents, available with about 7 others by right clicking, and choosing properties on any icon. I didn't even know such stuff was in there!
When newbies grab onto linux over windows because of eye candy, you can tell that the balance is getting ready to shift. Will it be far enough for us to feel it? I think I can finally answer that with a "likely".
</persuasionspeech>