Get the freaking "Open Link in Composer" off the context menu!
I really wonder if anyone has ever used that option. Using Composer is bad enough, but does anyone need to open a link in a new composer window? The worst part about this "feature" is due to bad coding in Composer: you can't stop it while a page is loading! If I click this option by accident, (which I often do) I have to wait a very long time before Composer loads and renders the page. I can't just stop it and go back to the original window. This is by far the most annoying "feature" in netscape.
BTW, I'm still using 4.04 on Win95 because I don't need the extra from 4.61. The new mail window is fine, except for how it automatically loads that Netcenter page.
Didn't anyone read the section of ESR's site about guns? (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/guns/) The reason for the 2nd ammendment (here) in the US is not so that people can hunt, or even for personal protection. We have guns to protect us from an opressive government. In the 1700's the people living in America revolted and created a new nation because their government was being too oppressive. There is not much preventing our current government from doing that, and it may be necessary at some point in the future to revolt against our beloved government. If (when) that day comes, how can we hope to achieve anything if we are not armed?
[This comment is horribly off topic and should get a -1.]
I can't help noticing (at least 3 times so far) that comments where people say they should get a -1 actually get a 4 or 5 when the moderation calms down. Maybe it's some kind of reverse psychology or something. Or maybe I'm just noticing a few examples and the majority of such comments _don't_ get marked down. I don't know; it's just an observation.
I know you can use a shell account, but those are hard to find these days. Besides, PPP would let use run a graphical web broweser. Granted, pages would take a few minutes to render, even ingnoring the cramped screen space, but that would be really cool. It would be more practical on a ti-89/92, but those use a 68000, so that's off topic.
I want one of these in my ti-86. Then i'd be able to watch it find roots of a 30 degree polynomial. And it would be great for games.
Seriously though, it does say it's code compatible with the original Z80. Would it be too hard for some calculator hackers to "upgrade" a graphing calculator?
Also, is the tcp/ip stack built into the chip? If so, could I browse the internet on my calc? You would just need a ppp implementation and a 9600 baud modem....
I totally agree. A friend and I figured this out over the summer: he owned a MD player/recorder, and I had a Rio. We wanted to combine the best features of both devices. The best idea we came up with was a small, portable MP3 player with songs stored on MD's. They would provide 150-170 MB (different for data/audio MD's, and I'm not sure which ones would have to be used) of storage space, much more than any flash ram, they would be cheap, and relatively skip-free. MD's cost only a few dollars, as opposed to something similar like Clik disks at $10 for 40 MB. They can be rewritten any number of times. I would estimate this could be done for about $200-250. It wouldn't have to be a recorder/encoder, it would just have to attach to the computer (usb maybe?).
Now we just need someone to make them.:)
(Note: the encoding format used on MD's is called ATRAC. It has an unmodifiable (I think) bitrate of 256 kbps.)
First, triple DES has an effective 112 bit key length because of the same meet-in-the-middle attack you described (section 8.2 in Applied Cryptography).
As for mixing SSL (which I think uses RC4, and possible others) and DES, that's a hard question. It might turn out that the combination of the two algorithms, which are strong by themselves, make a weak algorithm. Or it might be even stronger. It would depend on whether the two algorithms form a group, and there's no general method to determine that (AFAIK).
> Finally, any algorithm implemented in silicon is unlikely to be peer-reviewed
While the rest of your comment was thoughtful and correct, the above statement is simply incorrect. I doubt that any hardware vendor would spend the time and money to create a hardware implementation of an encryption protocol that might be worthless. Algorithms implemented in hardware are likely to be better tested and reviewed than what you get in the latest software.
Furthermore, key management issues are a major problem in software, because many programs do a horrible job of it. (And an encryption system is only as strong as the weakest link.) Hardware is more likely to have secure key management features.
In reference to bugs in hardware encryption, that is just extremely unlikely.
And it is entirely possible that a single hardware solution can support multiple levels of encryption. RC4 uses a variable length key, and so do several other peer-reviewed algorithms. From a practical standpoint, 1024 is way too much for a symmetric algorithm. 128 bits is safe from just about any brute force attack imaginable, and 256 bits is just inconceivable to crack with brute force.
The present system of moderation always seemed a little arbitrary and too easy to abuse. So here's a strange idea that I think just might work:
On each comment, have three radio buttons for Good, Bad, and Average, set to Average by default. Each comment gets a score, which starts at 0. Now, whenever someone gets moderator status, have them pick a button for every comment. When they click "Moderate", "Good" posts get their score incremented, "Bad" posts get it decremented, and "Average" posts are left alone.
Now for the important part: When the page is displayed, posts with scores in the top 15% get "Very good", next 20%, "Good", next 30%, "Average", next 20%, "Bad", and last 15% "Very Bad". Or those names can be changed to whatever. Since this system needs more raw feedback to work right, increase the number of moderators or frequency someone gets moderator access.
Another idea is to let everyone moderate all the time, but then people might not take it seriously, or not do it carefully.
Note that the method of determining the final category of a comment by definition averages out the individual moderations, so it is very difficult to abuse the system.
Possible problems would be the complexity of the code, especially keeping track of which comments a moderator has already moderated (because they get to moderate all comments). However, it doesn't seem much harder to implement than the metamoderation system.
Ive been thinking about the definition of life for a while. I guess it was inspired by the continual debate about whether viruses were alive (and we can extend that to prions) or not. It always seemed to me that they should be called a life form, and I tried to find a simple criterion. What I've come up with is this: if something can reproduce if put in a suitable envrionment, it is living. This definition is actually very broad, and I like it that way. It includes computer viruses and other forms of inorganic life. And why not? Isn't it a little anthropocentric to say that all life must be carbon-based? Of course there is a difference between computer viruses and real ones. The computer ones were created by humans, but the real ones evolved over millions of years. They should, however, both be considered "living," in some way or another.
I'm not sure why people are suddenly thinking that comptuter programming is a skill that everyone should learn in high school, like mathematics and history. Everyone should have some background in math and history to function normally in society, so those subjects are taught in high school. Nobody except programmers needs to know how to program. It's like teaching automitive engineering to everyone so they know how to build a car. Sure it's interesting, but everyone doesn't need to know how to build a car. Programming should be left for the programmers, who write operating systems and applications that other people use. Basic computer use skills _are_ necessary to function in the modern world, and they should be taught, maybe even required, but programming should not be.
Additionally, in my experience, most people simply can't program. It's just like higher levels of mathematics. If your brain isn't wired for it, you won't learn it well, no matter how much time you study. In the AP Comp. Sci. class I took in high school, many of the students in the class didn't understand fundamental concepts (such as: statements are executed in sequential order).
I found just a very minor point in a very well-written and thought-out article.
> The only facts in science are logic and > mathematics (and even these are only marginally > facts as Godel proved centuries later)
Godel did not prove anything of the sort. All facts of mathematics are just as true and just as valid as they were before Godel published his incompleteness theory. What Godel said was that not all true facts are provable. This has some very important implications about the plilosophical limits of mathematics and logic, but it does not change in any way all those facts that _are_ provable. And that provable category includes just about any mathematical statement that has relevance to anything. Godel had to go through many contortions just to create one mathematical statment that wasn't provable.
However, this still supports your original point that science is much less absolute than mathematics and logic and is based solely on induction (which is a shakey ground if you want to claim something as absolute).
Did anyone see the movie 'Seven?' Do you remember the last scene in that movie? Where the antagonist is on the ground with the protagonist holding a gun to his head. (I forgot the characters' names.) That was what I though of when I read that 'getting mad won't make you evil' and killing the emperor wouldn't make Luke evil. If you saw and understood 'Seven' then you'll realize that getting mad and killing someone _will_ make you evil. The whole trick of 'Seven' was that the seventh murder, the one for revenge, would be the murder of the serial killer himself (again, sorry, forgot the names). By killing him, the protagonist confirms that he has the sin of revenge within him, and that makes him evil.
The same thing applies to the scene in ROTJ. What Brin forgets is that things have symbolism. The movie is not just a string of events that may or may not make perfect sense. I saw that scene in ROTJ as a fight for the goodness of all of mankind, not whether one person can get mad enough to kill someone. Sure, you can pick out plot flaws, but it was the symbolism and the great overriding theme, the clash between good and evil in _everyone_, that made SW great.
(Just to put this in perspective, I'm 16 years old, so I don't have a driver's license yet.)
Thrusday morning, my father and I drove all the way out to the Javits Center in the city (from Long Island) for a fun afternoon of browsing around at various exhibits and various other stuff. We get there at about 11:00, and proceed to the registering booths to pick up ID tags. Around this point, we see on the bottom of the registration form that no minors below the age of 18 are allowed on the floor. That doesn't sound good. So we go ask a person at the information booth if that means I can't go in. It does. So we go up to the show managers section, or whatever its called. Due to insurance reasons and other things, it's their policy (dictated by their parent company in England) that nobody under 18 can be on the exhibit floor. No exceptions. Period.
Well. That sucks. That day was pretty dissapointing, as you can imagine. Does anyone understand why they have these strange policies? I've been to other computer shows at the Javits Center, and they don't have any age requirement or anything. While I was there, I also saw a man and his young daughter that had the same problem. I'd assume they went home dissapointed too. I saw a pair of 14-15 year olds walk up the stairs to the registration section and back down again without name tags. FWIW, I'm a programmer and have set up a local network at home for shared internet access and I'd guess I know more about comptuers, etc. that a good deal of the people there. Anyone have a similar experience anywhere?
As an advanced windows user (but planning on switching to something else soon) I can tell you it's pretty easy to do this:
copy *.c *.c_old
You can't use.c.old as the extension because the command interpreter is not perfectly aware of new features such as multiple dots in the filename, but this is pretty much equivalent.
(BTW: I'm not advocating windows or anything. Its long filename support is far from perfect and frequently has little quirks like this. I'm just pointing out that it _is_ possible.)
It was five of us at a friend's house one night. He (the acknowledged best player, but not by that much) put up eight dollars to our two bucks each. I put in money to make it interesting, but refused to play because I realized we had no chance. Surprisingly, they were doing pretty well into the late midgame. Then they had a tricky situation with a bishop. It turned out that each of the four of us were suggesting a different move; we finally decided on my choice, and then the single player got us with a simple bishop fork that somehow none of us noticed and we lost a rook. So much for that game. We were so busy aruging about which move to make, we missed an obvious fork.
Like the rest of you, I think this Kasparov thing will be a total failure with an easy win for GK. Although the site said something about the moves being suggested by GM's... If that's so, and people get to vote amoung four good moves, it might last a while. GK will still win, but it at least might take a while.
Re:Expires on 20010630? Well, isn't THAT special!!
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
It might have something to do with the fact that divx disks are/were encrypted (so that their ppv scheme couldn't be cracked) and the hardware had to decrypt them in real time while they were being played. They probably picked a base hardware requirement to make the standard on, which wasn't fast enough to decrypt a real dvd-quality data stream in real time, so they picked a lower quality format. It's yet another reason not to buy divx, but we don't have to worry about that anymore:)
The first time I saw Austin Powers (original) I thought it was good and fun, but not hillarious. The 2nd time I saw it, it got a little funnier, and the thrid time, it was even more. It really is true, as CmdrTaco says, that it grows on you.
(I haven't seen the 2nd but I will soon.)
So... If you've only seen the original once and didn't like it too much, SEE IT AGAIN!!! and again. and again. It'll get better every time.
kinda rambling, missing important point
on
Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
Overall I liked this article, but Katz misses some important stuff. First of all, he loses focus partway in when he starts rambling about _why_ the episode should/should not be censored. If I understood the article correctly, its focus should be _how_ the episode was censored, and why it was not successful. Those two topics are separate and combining them makes for a weaker essay.
Even worse, he then talks about high school as a Hellmouth and associated topics, straying very far from the thesis of the essay. Somehow, he makes it back to the original point at the end, after going off on several tangents.
(FWIW, I agree with him about both why it should not have been ceonsred and how it failed, but the article should have been more focused.)
Secondly, there is a major point about censorship that is not addressed at all in the essay. The United States is known for its freedom of speech and information. It is not surprising that when censorship (Actually, it was not really censorship because it was the WB itself who recalled the episode. It was not the government imposing rules.) actually is attempted, it fails. I see no faults in his argument as it applies to the US, or Canada, or any other developed nation where >10% of the people have internet access. But Katz forgets about those countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea where the government censors almost everything, including the internet. There are so few North Koreans with internet access that this wonderful distrubution mechanism just would not have a significant effect. If the government keeps tight enough controls on information, even the internet cannot obsolete censorship, at least not yet.
Don't assume that everyone has the same oppertunities to information access as you. My favorite statistic: over half of the world's population has never placed a phone call.
(I first saw this in Negroponte's/Being Digital/, then in the July issue of Wired. Dissapointingly, Negroponte glosses over that fact in his book, ignoratly assuming that the problems of repressive governments will magically dissappear shortly, and the whole world will have equal access to information. But now I'm off on a tangent, so I will end this comment.)
{I doubt anyone will see this comment; the post is several days old by now.}
> Buy up the makers of mp3spy... ?
The insightful moderator comment is right - I just read on mp3.com that checkout.com has bought a large chunk of gamespy. This company is owned by Michael Ovitz. They're going to use mp3spy to promote their content. For all the details, try: http://mp3.com/news/265.html
[sigh]... I though someone could just make a nice looking front end for shoutcast (the web site is rather ugly and slow to load, esp. the rock/alternative genre). But they have to get bought up in the crazy rush to invest in anything having the symbols M, P, and 3 in its name. Too bad. Why can companies just leave well enough alone? Now I have to go back to using that ugly site (unless someone wants to make a free version?)
> Current genetic engineering technology is merely > taking the direct path to change, rather than the > slower, round-about method of breeding for > characteristics: both methods work, and to the > same end.
The only problem is that even current methods of genetic engineering go far beyond what is possible by simply breeding. A simple example: how long do you think it would take to produce a strain of bacteria that produced human insulin? Now, making crops immume to insects could be a valid product of natural evolution, and these resistant crops benefit mankind. But most efforts in genetic engineering are not possible with other methods. Choosing the sex of children, and more importanly, screening for and selecting against certain "undesirable traits" (currently stuff like Downs symdrome, but soon could be below-average intelligence, violent tendancies, or just a big nose) could never have been done with traditional methods and does have dangerous implications. (Do you want to live in a world where everyone is just about the same, because all other potential children that were not just perfect were supressed before birth.)
I am not necessarily opposed to taking genetic engineering as far as it can go, (and I do certainly do not support government intervention) but I do think we need to be very careful and responsible. We must not lose track of our humanity.
From what I can tell, the Lyra, a new MP3 player from RCA seems like a much better idea than the varoman plus. It can accept CompactFlash memory cards (type I or II) but the real benefit is that the upcoming IBM microdrive fits into a CompactFlash socket. That's right: 340 mb of MP3's that can fit in your pocket. And the drive will only cost a few hundred dollars, much less than the equivalent amount in solid state cards. The only problem may be skipping. It depends on how well IBM makes their microdrive.
For more information, see: http://www.mp3.com/news/239.html
AFAIK, this thing won't be available until the end of the year, and the microdirve later than that, so it's a long time to wait, but it looks like the Lyra has the best technology.
The Lyra also can be upgraded to play other audio formats which could be useful 10 years later when MP3 is not in use anymore.
There are at least 2 C compilers (more accurately: cross-compilers) but you don't want to use them. The code is bloated and slow, which is especially bad on a machine with only 96k free ram (which can't all be used at once) and a 6 mhz chip.
For the compilers, try these: http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tcc.zip http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tisco.zip http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/zcc_16.zip
and just browse around the directory to see what else you can find: http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/
But Z80 assembly isn't very hard to learn and it's kinda fun when you get used to it.
I really doubt the ti-86 has enough processing power to decode MP3 on the fly. (If you don't know, it's a Z80 running at 6Mhz) My p166 uses about 10% of the cpu time playing mp3's, that means you'd need (roughly) a 16 mhz pentium. But the Z80 has a smaller instuction set than the pentium and would need more instructions to do the same thing. Even with an accelerated ti-86, it only runs at 10 mhz (I think). Add to that that the ti-86 only has 32k of contiguous ram to work in. I won't say impossible, (maybe very low bitrates?) but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another badly needed "feature":
Get the freaking "Open Link in Composer" off the context menu!
I really wonder if anyone has ever used that option. Using Composer is bad enough, but does anyone need to open a link in a new composer window? The worst part about this "feature" is due to bad coding in Composer: you can't stop it while a page is loading! If I click this option by accident, (which I often do) I have to wait a very long time before Composer loads and renders the page. I can't just stop it and go back to the original window. This is by far the most annoying "feature" in netscape.
BTW, I'm still using 4.04 on Win95 because I don't need the extra from 4.61. The new mail window is fine, except for how it automatically loads that Netcenter page.
Didn't anyone read the section of ESR's site about guns? (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/guns/) The reason for the 2nd ammendment (here) in the US is not so that people can hunt, or even for personal protection. We have guns to protect us from an opressive government. In the 1700's the people living in America revolted and created a new nation because their government was being too oppressive. There is not much preventing our current government from doing that, and it may be necessary at some point in the future to revolt against our beloved government. If (when) that day comes, how can we hope to achieve anything if we are not armed?
[This comment is horribly off topic and should get a -1.]
I can't help noticing (at least 3 times so far) that comments where people say they should get a -1 actually get a 4 or 5 when the moderation calms down. Maybe it's some kind of reverse psychology or something. Or maybe I'm just noticing a few examples and the majority of such comments _don't_ get marked down. I don't know; it's just an observation.
I know you can use a shell account, but those are hard to find these days. Besides, PPP would let use run a graphical web broweser. Granted, pages would take a few minutes to render, even ingnoring the cramped screen space, but that would be really cool. It would be more practical on a ti-89/92, but those use a 68000, so that's off topic.
All TI graphing calculators from the TI-80 to the TI-86 use Z80's.
I want one of these in my ti-86. Then i'd be able to watch it find roots of a 30 degree polynomial. And it would be great for games.
Seriously though, it does say it's code compatible with the original Z80. Would it be too hard for some calculator hackers to "upgrade" a graphing calculator?
Also, is the tcp/ip stack built into the chip? If so, could I browse the internet on my calc? You would just need a ppp implementation and a 9600 baud modem....
I totally agree. A friend and I figured this out over the summer: he owned a MD player/recorder, and I had a Rio. We wanted to combine the best features of both devices. The best idea we came up with was a small, portable MP3 player with songs stored on MD's. They would provide 150-170 MB (different for data/audio MD's, and I'm not sure which ones would have to be used) of storage space, much more than any flash ram, they would be cheap, and relatively skip-free. MD's cost only a few dollars, as opposed to something similar like Clik disks at $10 for 40 MB. They can be rewritten any number of times. I would estimate this could be done for about $200-250. It wouldn't have to be a recorder/encoder, it would just have to attach to the computer (usb maybe?).
:)
Now we just need someone to make them.
(Note: the encoding format used on MD's is called ATRAC. It has an unmodifiable (I think) bitrate of 256 kbps.)
First, triple DES has an effective 112 bit key length because of the same meet-in-the-middle attack you described (section 8.2 in Applied Cryptography).
As for mixing SSL (which I think uses RC4, and possible others) and DES, that's a hard question. It might turn out that the combination of the two algorithms, which are strong by themselves, make a weak algorithm. Or it might be even stronger. It would depend on whether the two algorithms form a group, and there's no general method to determine that (AFAIK).
> Finally, any algorithm implemented in silicon is unlikely to be peer-reviewed
While the rest of your comment was thoughtful and correct, the above statement is simply incorrect. I doubt that any hardware vendor would spend the time and money to create a hardware implementation of an encryption protocol that might be worthless. Algorithms implemented in hardware are likely to be better tested and reviewed than what you get in the latest software.
Furthermore, key management issues are a major problem in software, because many programs do a horrible job of it. (And an encryption system is only as strong as the weakest link.) Hardware is more likely to have secure key management features.
In reference to bugs in hardware encryption, that is just extremely unlikely.
And it is entirely possible that a single hardware solution can support multiple levels of encryption. RC4 uses a variable length key, and so do several other peer-reviewed algorithms. From a practical standpoint, 1024 is way too much for a symmetric algorithm. 128 bits is safe from just about any brute force attack imaginable, and 256 bits is just inconceivable to crack with brute force.
The present system of moderation always seemed a little arbitrary and too easy to abuse. So here's a strange idea that I think just might work:
On each comment, have three radio buttons for Good, Bad, and Average, set to Average by default. Each comment gets a score, which starts at 0. Now, whenever someone gets moderator status, have them pick a button for every comment. When they click "Moderate", "Good" posts get their score incremented, "Bad" posts get it decremented, and "Average" posts are left alone.
Now for the important part: When the page is displayed, posts with scores in the top 15% get "Very good", next 20%, "Good", next 30%, "Average", next 20%, "Bad", and last 15% "Very Bad". Or those names can be changed to whatever. Since this system needs more raw feedback to work right, increase the number of moderators or frequency someone gets moderator access.
Another idea is to let everyone moderate all the time, but then people might not take it seriously, or not do it carefully.
Note that the method of determining the final category of a comment by definition averages out the individual moderations, so it is very difficult to abuse the system.
Possible problems would be the complexity of the code, especially keeping track of which comments a moderator has already moderated (because they get to moderate all comments). However, it doesn't seem much harder to implement than the metamoderation system.
Ive been thinking about the definition of life for a while. I guess it was inspired by the continual debate about whether viruses were alive (and we can extend that to prions) or not. It always seemed to me that they should be called a life form, and I tried to find a simple criterion. What I've come up with is this: if something can reproduce if put in a suitable envrionment, it is living. This definition is actually very broad, and I like it that way. It includes computer viruses and other forms of inorganic life. And why not? Isn't it a little anthropocentric to say that all life must be carbon-based? Of course there is a difference between computer viruses and real ones. The computer ones were created by humans, but the real ones evolved over millions of years. They should, however, both be considered "living," in some way or another.
I'm not sure why people are suddenly thinking that comptuter programming is a skill that everyone should learn in high school, like mathematics and history. Everyone should have some background in math and history to function normally in society, so those subjects are taught in high school. Nobody except programmers needs to know how to program. It's like teaching automitive engineering to everyone so they know how to build a car. Sure it's interesting, but everyone doesn't need to know how to build a car. Programming should be left for the programmers, who write operating systems and applications that other people use.
Basic computer use skills _are_ necessary to function in the modern world, and they should be taught, maybe even required, but programming should not be.
Additionally, in my experience, most people simply can't program. It's just like higher levels of mathematics. If your brain isn't wired for it, you won't learn it well, no matter how much time you study. In the AP Comp. Sci. class I took in high school, many of the students in the class didn't understand fundamental concepts (such as: statements are executed in sequential order).
I found just a very minor point in a very well-written and thought-out article.
> The only facts in science are logic and
> mathematics (and even these are only marginally
> facts as Godel proved centuries later)
Godel did not prove anything of the sort. All facts of mathematics are just as true and just as valid as they were before Godel published his incompleteness theory. What Godel said was that not all true facts are provable. This has some very important implications about the plilosophical limits of mathematics and logic, but it does not change in any way all those facts that _are_ provable. And that provable category includes just about any mathematical statement that has relevance to anything. Godel had to go through many contortions just to create one mathematical statment that wasn't provable.
However, this still supports your original point that science is much less absolute than mathematics and logic and is based solely on induction (which is a shakey ground if you want to claim something as absolute).
BTW, Pauli's first name was Wolfgang.
Did anyone see the movie 'Seven?' Do you remember the last scene in that movie? Where the antagonist is on the ground with the protagonist holding a gun to his head. (I forgot the characters' names.) That was what I though of when I read that 'getting mad won't make you evil' and killing the emperor wouldn't make Luke evil. If you saw and understood 'Seven' then you'll realize that getting mad and killing someone _will_ make you evil. The whole trick of 'Seven' was that the seventh murder, the one for revenge, would be the murder of the serial killer himself (again, sorry, forgot the names). By killing him, the protagonist confirms that he has the sin of revenge within him, and that makes him evil.
The same thing applies to the scene in ROTJ. What Brin forgets is that things have symbolism. The movie is not just a string of events that may or may not make perfect sense. I saw that scene in ROTJ as a fight for the goodness of all of mankind, not whether one person can get mad enough to kill someone. Sure, you can pick out plot flaws, but it was the symbolism and the great overriding theme, the clash between good and evil in _everyone_, that made SW great.
(Just to put this in perspective, I'm 16 years old, so I don't have a driver's license yet.)
Thrusday morning, my father and I drove all the way out to the Javits Center in the city (from Long Island) for a fun afternoon of browsing around at various exhibits and various other stuff. We get there at about 11:00, and proceed to the registering booths to pick up ID tags. Around this point, we see on the bottom of the registration form that no minors below the age of 18 are allowed on the floor. That doesn't sound good. So we go ask a person at the information booth if that means I can't go in. It does. So we go up to the show managers section, or whatever its called. Due to insurance reasons and other things, it's their policy (dictated by their parent company in England) that nobody under 18 can be on the exhibit floor. No exceptions. Period.
Well. That sucks. That day was pretty dissapointing, as you can imagine. Does anyone understand why they have these strange policies? I've been to other computer shows at the Javits Center, and they don't have any age requirement or anything. While I was there, I also saw a man and his young daughter that had the same problem. I'd assume they went home dissapointed too. I saw a pair of 14-15 year olds walk up the stairs to the registration section and back down again without name tags. FWIW, I'm a programmer and have set up a local network at home for shared internet access and I'd guess I know more about comptuers, etc. that a good deal of the people there. Anyone have a similar experience anywhere?
> [How *does* one copy *.c to *.c.old in Windows?
.c.old as the extension because the command interpreter is not perfectly aware of new features such as multiple dots in the filename, but this is pretty much equivalent.
As an advanced windows user (but planning on switching to something else soon) I can tell you it's pretty easy to do this:
copy *.c *.c_old
You can't use
(BTW: I'm not advocating windows or anything. Its long filename support is far from perfect and frequently has little quirks like this. I'm just pointing out that it _is_ possible.)
It was five of us at a friend's house one night. He (the acknowledged best player, but not by that much) put up eight dollars to our two bucks each. I put in money to make it interesting, but refused to play because I realized we had no chance. Surprisingly, they were doing pretty well into the late midgame. Then they had a tricky situation with a bishop. It turned out that each of the four of us were suggesting a different move; we finally decided on my choice, and then the single player got us with a simple bishop fork that somehow none of us noticed and we lost a rook. So much for that game. We were so busy aruging about which move to make, we missed an obvious fork.
Like the rest of you, I think this Kasparov thing will be a total failure with an easy win for GK. Although the site said something about the moves being suggested by GM's... If that's so, and people get to vote amoung four good moves, it might last a while. GK will still win, but it at least might take a while.
It might have something to do with the fact that divx disks are/were encrypted (so that their ppv scheme couldn't be cracked) and the hardware had to decrypt them in real time while they were being played. They probably picked a base hardware requirement to make the standard on, which wasn't fast enough to decrypt a real dvd-quality data stream in real time, so they picked a lower quality format. It's yet another reason not to buy divx, but we don't have to worry about that anymore :)
Just sharing:
The first time I saw Austin Powers (original) I thought it was good and fun, but not hillarious. The 2nd time I saw it, it got a little funnier, and the thrid time, it was even more. It really is true, as CmdrTaco says, that it grows on you.
(I haven't seen the 2nd but I will soon.)
So... If you've only seen the original once and didn't like it too much, SEE IT AGAIN!!! and again. and again. It'll get better every time.
Overall I liked this article, but Katz misses some important stuff. First of all, he loses focus partway in when he starts rambling about _why_ the episode should/should not be censored. If I understood the article correctly, its focus should be _how_ the episode was censored, and why it was not successful. Those two topics are separate and combining them makes for a weaker essay.
/Being Digital/, then in the July issue of Wired. Dissapointingly, Negroponte glosses over that fact in his book, ignoratly assuming that the problems of repressive governments will magically dissappear shortly, and the whole world will have equal access to information. But now I'm off on a tangent, so I will end this comment.)
Even worse, he then talks about high school as a Hellmouth and associated topics, straying very far from the thesis of the essay. Somehow, he makes it back to the original point at the end, after going off on several tangents.
(FWIW, I agree with him about both why it should not have been ceonsred and how it failed, but the article should have been more focused.)
Secondly, there is a major point about censorship that is not addressed at all in the essay. The United States is known for its freedom of speech and information. It is not surprising that when censorship (Actually, it was not really censorship because it was the WB itself who recalled the episode. It was not the government imposing rules.) actually is attempted, it fails. I see no faults in his argument as it applies to the US, or Canada, or any other developed nation where >10% of the people have internet access. But Katz forgets about those countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea where the government censors almost everything, including the internet. There are so few North Koreans with internet access that this wonderful distrubution mechanism just would not have a significant effect. If the government keeps tight enough controls on information, even the internet cannot obsolete censorship, at least not yet.
Don't assume that everyone has the same oppertunities to information access as you. My favorite statistic: over half of the world's population has never placed a phone call.
(I first saw this in Negroponte's
{I doubt anyone will see this comment; the post is several days old by now.}
> Buy up the makers of mp3spy... ?
The insightful moderator comment is right - I just read on mp3.com that checkout.com has bought a large chunk of gamespy. This company is owned by Michael Ovitz. They're going to use mp3spy to promote their content. For all the details, try:
http://mp3.com/news/265.html
[sigh]... I though someone could just make a nice looking front end for shoutcast (the web site is rather ugly and slow to load, esp. the rock/alternative genre). But they have to get bought up in the crazy rush to invest in anything having the symbols M, P, and 3 in its name. Too bad. Why can companies just leave well enough alone? Now I have to go back to using that ugly site (unless someone wants to make a free version?)
> Current genetic engineering technology is merely
> taking the direct path to change, rather than the
> slower, round-about method of breeding for
> characteristics: both methods work, and to the
> same end.
The only problem is that even current methods of genetic engineering go far beyond what is possible by simply breeding. A simple example: how long do you think it would take to produce a strain of bacteria that produced human insulin? Now, making crops immume to insects could be a valid product of natural evolution, and these resistant crops benefit mankind. But most efforts in genetic engineering are not possible with other methods. Choosing the sex of children, and more importanly, screening for and selecting against certain "undesirable traits" (currently stuff like Downs symdrome, but soon could be below-average intelligence, violent tendancies, or just a big nose) could never have been done with traditional methods and does have dangerous implications. (Do you want to live in a world where everyone is just about the same, because all other potential children that were not just perfect were supressed before birth.)
I am not necessarily opposed to taking genetic engineering as far as it can go, (and I do certainly do not support government intervention) but I do think we need to be very careful and responsible. We must not lose track of our humanity.
From what I can tell, the Lyra, a new MP3 player from RCA seems like a much better idea than the varoman plus. It can accept CompactFlash memory cards (type I or II) but the real benefit is that the upcoming IBM microdrive fits into a CompactFlash socket. That's right: 340 mb of MP3's that can fit in your pocket. And the drive will only cost a few hundred dollars, much less than the equivalent amount in solid state cards. The only problem may be skipping. It depends on how well IBM makes their microdrive.
For more information, see:
http://www.mp3.com/news/239.html
AFAIK, this thing won't be available until the end of the year, and the microdirve later than that, so it's a long time to wait, but it looks like the Lyra has the best technology.
The Lyra also can be upgraded to play other audio formats which could be useful 10 years later when MP3 is not in use anymore.
There are at least 2 C compilers (more accurately: cross-compilers) but you don't want to use them. The code is bloated and slow, which is especially bad on a machine with only 96k free ram (which can't all be used at once) and a 6 mhz chip.
For the compilers, try these:
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tcc.zip
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/tisco.zip
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/zcc_16.zip
and just browse around the directory to see what else you can find:
http://www.ticalc.org/pub/dos/asm/
But Z80 assembly isn't very hard to learn and it's kinda fun when you get used to it.
I really doubt the ti-86 has enough processing power to decode MP3 on the fly. (If you don't know, it's a Z80 running at 6Mhz) My p166 uses about 10% of the cpu time playing mp3's, that means you'd need (roughly) a 16 mhz pentium. But the Z80 has a smaller instuction set than the pentium and would need more instructions to do the same thing. Even with an accelerated ti-86, it only runs at 10 mhz (I think). Add to that that the ti-86 only has 32k of contiguous ram to work in. I won't say impossible, (maybe very low bitrates?) but I wouldn't hold my breath.