Maybe too late for mod points but I had to point this out:
Your observation, while a very smart one (which I had a good chuckle over before thinking about it) doesn't take into account one very important factor. The same factor that makes water cooling work for server rooms:
The Water
Yes, adding the ice to the water would do you no good but a perfectly good setup can be made just from the water. It would even work in the kitchen next to the fridge. In fact, a better setup is to route the water directly from your tap through the fan and you'd never have to refill nor prime the hose.
Under this setup, you are transferring heat to the cold water that comes from the outside pipes into your home and then back outside your house. You could even route the water right back into the sink!
I rarely pick up a copy of Wired magazine nowadays but the Diamond cover was just too enticing. Lots more detail for the geeks in this article including a few choice ones I picked out in response to the parent.
(1) The artificial diamonds from some techniques were too perfect compared to regular diamonds and could be identified.
(2) DeBeers did launch a campaign called the "Gem Defensive Programme." From the Wired article:
But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gem-quality synthetics has sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem Defensive Programme - a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help distinguish man-made from mined stones.
(3) Diamonds grown with another technique called Chemical Vapor Disposition are indistinguishable from naturally formed diamonds. From the wired article:
To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones.
This was a very interesting article and has made me afraid of buying diamonds. It's like buying a car and having it depreciate faster than the stock market crash.
I may be going out on a limb here, and I'm usually pretty picky about what I post (I'm a karma whore I admit it) but I just have to speak up. Am I the only one who fell in love with the 5151 style keyboards?
These were the keyboards with TWO square keyapds. That is, there is a full square set of navigation keys instead of the silly inverted-T or plus arrow keypads. In other words, it was like having two numeric keypads with one permanently with the num lock off.
Now, before all of you who are used to the inverted-T scream murder, you should really take a look at how efficient the square keypad is once you learn it. In fact, if you want to improve productivity, I suggest you unlock the num locks and get used to using the square navigation key set.
I know that I can navigate an editor or word processor at about quadruple the speed of the average person.
I can do this because I have access to more navigation keys completely by feel. I suppose you could learn the inverted keys by feel but since they are separated, I'm pretty sure this would be slower.
For example, I can go beginning of line, end of line, beginning of document (with CTRL), end of document (with CTRL), page up, page down, select document (CTRL-5/center key) and enter. It drives me nuts when people left-arrow to the beginning of the line, down-arrow down a long doc (pg down is 30x faster) etc. I just find it too slow.
Yes, I know you can just hit the num-lock key but there was something nice about having the numeric keypad there as well. I know there is also some space savings with the inverted-T, but if that is the real factor, I'd rather not have it at all. Personally, I never use it.
I may be in the minority but somehow I feel like there are other people who have found the magic performance enhancement of havng a full set of nav keys. I just tried putting my fingers on the + nav (microsoft natural keyboard) and my fingers just aren't comfortable. But with index on 4, middle on 8, thumb on 2, and ring finger on 6 with a pinky on enter, I can out-nav anybody. note: thumb for end, index for home, and ring finger for pgup/pgdn and del. Also thumb for ins (though I don't find that I use insert often).
There is near unanimous fear of "Real ID" (at least from slashDot posters).
I think it's important to point out why.
While I'm sure it appears obvious to many of us, I think others may be wondering why this is such a big deal. The fact that this bill passed seems to suggest some people (many people) don't know what the implications are.
I'm sure I'll miss some of the reasoning (feel free to add on) but here goes my take on it. As a disclaimer, I am Canadian, but I don't think that changes much:
A driver's license, like a social security number, is unique. This means we can uniquely identify a person through their driver's license.
The important differences are:
(1) A driver's license is often used as a saved form of ID while an SSN is not (except for employment purposes). This means your driver's license can be found in many places, potentially at places like your video rental shop.
(2) A driver's license is used as photo ID. This means it is on you and there are several places where the information can be grabbed. Possibly in places as innocent as a bar.
(3) A universal driver's license introduces the idea of a universal reader. Because of it being the only thing that can be reliably found on 99% of the adult population, it could become an easily scanned item to be used as a membership identifier (among other things). If this is done, a single ID can identify you in literally thousands of establishments with a paper trail that will trounce your credit card trail.
(4) When you tie in "saved everywhere", with "stealable anywhere" with "scannable anywhere/information everywhere" you've got a severe loss of privacy.
The reasoning from (1) to (4) is probably not obvious to a lot of people. That's ultimately what makes it dangerous. You get to give up your freedom but it sneaks up on you in a way that you actually agreed to it (which makes it a lot harder to complain about when it happens).
I answered this in a separate post but don't confuse a standardized format with a format that cannot adjust to the capture parameters of a camera.
For example, DTS (for home) is a digital encoding system for sound but it is very flexible. You can specify the bit depth, the encoding rate, the number of channels and the amount of compression. In other words, you can encode anything from AM radio to 6.1 (and higher I think) all in the same format.
In the same way, a RAW format could easily support multiple bit depths to match the bit depth of the camera. It could also support multiple color square patterns (though almost every camera manufactured uses the RGBG square with the exception of Sony's new camera and the Foveon sensor in Sigma cameras. Don't flog me if I missed one.).
The rest of the data could be encoded as meta data and basically are *hints* on how to decode the image anyways and are not part of the bitmap image. By hints I mean readings from ISO, shutter speed, etc.
You are perhaps confusing a standard method of encoding with a standard method of getting the best photo out of a RAW file. Certainly most cameras can encode a RAW file in the same format but each would require a different set of decoding curves to get the best picture out of it. But that is where great tools and a community willing to share processing files can be a great benefit.
With few exceptions, all digital cameras use the same type of CCD where the pixels are read in an RGBG square (red green blue green). I believe Sony has an encoding with an extra color and the Foveon sensor used in Sigma cameras reads RGB all in the space of one pixel (very cool technology and produces great results).
So a standard, at its most basic, would simply encode a certain number of brightness levels (probably set variably) for each pixel and define the color square (RGBG, RGBC (I think for Sony) and RGB in a single pixel for Sigma).
Then they could probably encode most of the rest of it as meta data like in JPEG images except the naming conventions should be standardized. For example, ISO, shutter speed, etc.
And for the guy that mentioned TIFF, TIFF has none of the encoding details like the color square needed to encode a RAW image.
By the way, the reason you want the RAW image format is that as soon as you apply any processing to a JPEG image, you lose all the quality. You can't do more than a small amount of processing (brightening/darkening/curves) before you throw the detail out of the image. If you ever did a "levels" and then saw a bunch of peaks and valleys where the missing data was stretched out, THAT is the problem with processing JPEG images.
With RAW, you might be able to pull a whole slew of details out of a part of the image which, when transferred to JPEG, all turned into a 255 brightness white pixel or a 0 dark black pixel. With proper curves, you could simulate different film stocks more easily. Doing it after its been made into a JPEG gives you sub-standard results.
I know the story is about getting manufacturers to open up their RAW formats but I think the preferred goal is to have camera manufacturers standardize on ONE format.
Note that Adobe has already developed an open raw format called DNG (Digital Negative). They have a good track record with open formats with PDF files. You may or may not like them, but you they certainly can be generated by non-Adobe products and as far as I'm aware, nobody pays any license fee for that.
Another plus for DNG is that Adobe has a free DNG converter which will convert RAW files from many popular cameras to the DNG format.
Here's the interesting thing about patents and, if you are a patent expert, I realize you already know this, but I think most people don't see the true irony of patents.
The irony is: they were designed to protect the small guy from the big guy. That's right. I shall repeat. They were designed to protect the small guy from the big guy.
They did this to encourage innovation.
You see, some guy in his garage could invent the television, a big company could come along and copy it, and make billions because he has a bigger operating budget. With patents, the guy could protect his invention, and the big guys couldn't steal his idea. All of a sudden, people want to invent because they can protect their ideas.
But now the patent system has turned on its head. It essentially protects the big guys from the small guys. Probably if we looked at patents in their stricted sense, a kid in their garage could write a text editor and infringe on hundreds of patents. I realize this doesn't usually result in a lawsuit, but the system is so convoluted that the only way to understand it is to hire expensive lawyers, which small guys tend not to be able to afford. So in many cases, the small guy gives up when faced with serious opposition (think RIAA).
Okay, I will freely admit that this post is a little inflamatory and that usually lawsuits are not launched even when a patent is owned for things like using key-combinations on a keyboard. But that's not the point.
The point is this: The patent system no longer does what it was supposed to do which is encourage the creation of new ideas. If a system no longer does what it was designed to do, THAT is the definition of broken.
I'm probably not the first one who's thought of this but it seems to me that cookie abuse could be reduced dramatically without affecting most websites by doing the following:
"Disable cookies on all images that are being pulled from another domain."
That is, if a web page grabs an image from another domain (a banner, pixel, etc.) then pull it but don't send any of the cookie information for that image.
I mean isn't that the way that most developers track access across websites? You put a one-pixel image and set the cookie through there. Then by reading the http_refer, you know where they've been and associate it to a single user. To track across sites though, this pixel is usually on a separate domain than the site being accessed.
By the way, I originally thought to disable cookies on all images but realized some servers may do security checking via cookies before sending an image. But there is very little legitimate use for sending cookies on images that are outside the domain.
Also, the same could be said of ANYTHING that is pulled off a different domain including scripts, css, etc. If it is on the same domain, send the cookies. If not, then make the request but don't send the cookies.
I would say precious few sites would depend on this behavior and it shouldn't break anything except for the tracking (which we want to break). Not saying that a site couldn't be made to break on this but I can't think of many reasons why a site would.
By the way, I think cookies are great for the most part. SlashDot uses them, I use them, anything with a login (mostly) uses them. I find it humorous when people insist that cookies are evil and you shouldn't have a single one. You can just as easily fake a cookie for a session by sticking an ID in the URL which, personally, I think is worse. Now your personally identifying tracker is available for all to see.
The biggest impact Firefox will have on web development is it will increase the cost of entry into run-almost-anywhere scripted websites.
Note that I'm not saying this is bad or that there aren't good effects Firefox has (in fact, I believe it is a great browser). Just that the biggest impact on *development* is it will increase the cost of entry on scripted sites.
This may be a good or bad thing. When the web first started, it was possible to be an "HTML Expert" by doing layouts with tables. I kid you not. This was advanced at one time and people had to figure out how to do it.
With browsers having pretty much settled down (meaning that Microsoft stopped releasing new browsers and 90% market share belonged to Microsoft), the wealth of knowledge on HTML coding has grown considerably. It was hard to be an *expert* at HTML or Scripting because everyone had done it before. That said, there are some truly brilliant people at sites like QuirksMode.
Now I feel that the new direction that uber-coders are going for is *useful* DHTML scripting (also known as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model to manipulate HTML live). By useful, I don't mean a cursor with a trail of stars. I mean things like popup calendars for date selectors, rich text editors, GMail and WYSIWYG page editors with live previews.
DHTML is still hard and mostly poorly documented. Anybody who has made a rich text editor for MSIE knows that it isn't too bad anymore. There is more documentation on how to do it. Definitely not *a lot* but enough that you can find your way through it.
Try this though: Make an iframe window that simulates a regular window. Okay. Now do it so that is supports MSIE, FireFox and Safari. If you want to (eventually) support more than 75% of the market, you have to support FireFox now and I'd throw Safari on the list as it is the default browser (I think) on the Mac.
Some of the toughies are the event handlers for these browsers which are quite different. I've written code to make them both work with one code base but there is virtually no documentation on this. There are dozens of quirks not listed and the only way you can figure 'em out is through trial and error.
Okay, I know I haven't covered all my bases in making this argument, but I think the smarts you will need to be an uber-coder for DHTML just got harder. This is good because there is room for new experts. If you are a great coder, there is a chance to be a brilliant cross-browser DHTML coder. If you are strictly average (nothing wrong with that), your job may have got harder.
Ironically, code re-use on JavaScript seems to be very low.
By the way, if you need evidence that cross-browser DHTML is hard, it even took Google a while to get Firefox compatible with GMail. Think how much cash they've got.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of plain English and I love the idea behind the "Plain English Campaign," but their guides are poor for a website that is advocating Plain English.
Consider these lines from their guide "How to Write Plain English."
Most experts would agree that clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words.
Should read:
Make your sentences about 15 to 20 words long.
And...
However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. But most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Should read...
If you find yourself writing a long sentence to explain a complicated point, try breaking your sentence up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, try breaking it up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, break it up.
And...
To explain the difference between active and passive verbs, we need to look briefly at how a sentence fits together. Almost every sentence has three important parts. There are three main parts to almost every sentence:
Should be:
Well, whatever it is, it shouldn't say the same sentence twice at the end.
These are just a few examples and I'm sure one could advocate the use of the original in some situations. But read the entire article and you will see useful information and perhaps "better-than-average use of plain English" but it won't be as great as it must be for a site of this kind.
My test for well written in English is that my mind doesn't wander. I knew this wasn't great English because I sometimes found it hard to concentrate on the material. This is especially bad when I'm interested in it. IMHO, the "Elements of Style" is a better introduction to good writing.
Before you jump all over me for any badly constructed sentences in this post, remember that the standard for a "teaching plain english" article has to be much higher than a SlashDot post.;)
I've been trying to find the "Last Stop" for an argument for evolution for quite some time. I finally found this amazing article: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
I'm sure many of you (who wanted to know anyways) have come across this but this is the cat's meow for evolutionary arguments. It is designed to be easy to read, but it does not pander to the lowest common denominator (in fact far from it).
If you haven't read it, you WILL learn something new.
Quote: Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?
Does anybody else get the willies (shades of SCO) just hearing this? Okay, I admit it's a little knee-jerk but how many successful, in the contributes to society domain, strictly IP companies are there?
I know you were being funny, but this does open up the door for potentially running MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). The DS is an interesting platform for this since the lower screen could be used to insert quarters, push Player 1/2 start buttons, etc.
Of course, I'd really be wanting this on the PSP with its gorgeous screen (if you own one, you know what I'm talking about). Since it has a memory card (better to hold games with) it would probably be the better overall MAME platform. I'm getting excited just thinking about it.
If you have a chance, you should check out the link above on the definition of woman. It is unintentionally funny.
No respect I tell ya. Here are some (admittedly selective) excerpts:
"the woman kept house while the man hunted"
charwoman: a human female who does housework; "the char will clean the carpet"
a female person who plays a significant role (wife or mistress or girlfriend) in the life of a particular man; "he was faithful to his woman"
was "taken out of man" (Gen. 2:23), and therefore the man has the preeminence. "The head of the woman is the man;" but yet honour is to be shown to the wife, "as unto the weaker vessel"
but one sure-fire way to remember this word is to think of basketball player Kobe Bryant, who is the guaranteed epitome of feminine
I like the definition that includes "mistress" then, for an example sentence, says "he was faithful to his woman." I can count at least three things ironic/funny about just that one definition.:)
I keep hearing this over and over like it is fact, but honestly, I don't know anybody who likes brown nosing in an office environment. INCLUDING the management. I think what you are really saying is, you need to SHOW RESPECT to GET RESPECT which is pretty fair. Isn't it ironic when a manager shows respect to employees he *GETS IT* but when a tech does it to his manager, it is brown nosing.
Allow me say that I'm sure you are well-intentioned by your post, but I think you may be looking at this the wrong way.
Just as you don't expect the "corporate power chain" to understand the tech stuff, you probably don't understand all the management stuff your audience does. But life is better when you do (just as visa versa). Don't we love managers who understand the technology? Of course. But you can do the same the other way. Let me ask you, do you understand your manager's problems?
I know it is not your job to understand it, but it will help immensely. Like have your tried wording your suggestions in a manner that will appeal to management? Have you tried tying it to real numbers?
For example: By simplifying the architecture of the system, I estimate that we can reduce the time spent on fixing bugs by 50%. Also, since we are reusing code, adding more features is easier. I predict we can also write code faster by a factor of 25% because there will be more code re-use. Although this will result in an up-front investment of three months work, additional changes will be easier and faster to make. The net result is that within about 6 months, we will be in the same spot but with a better architected system. [Okay, this is NOT the report you'd write, but you get my drift]
By the way, I used to do this all the time. I'd often make reports with suggestions outlining why I recommend each aspect and what effect it will have on the business.
I'm happy when people make suggestions, but as a manager, it is HARD to do the work to the next level. For example, if you are managing 10 people, spending 30 minutes a day with each person takes five hours leaving three hours left in a day. Most managers don't have the time to figure out the logistics and they don't understand the problem as well as you do. I love it when somebody comes up to me with all the arguments thought out. THAT is easy to process.
Having been raised on tech and management principles (graduate of a business program), I can say that people who understand both the tech and the management side are the most valuable people in the company. Become one. We need more.
As a related aside, I am now the CEO of a successful and profitable Internet company. And of course, I still read slashdot.
It is an interesting idea but I think there would have to be a lot of research that goes into this and here's what I mean.
The article is right in that certain things don't need 100% accuracy and that small variations in the answers can yield very good results. This could be important when time is more important than 100% accuracy.
That said, how do we know if the variations are small? Only 1 bit can change a huge negative number into a huge positive number in a standard integer (Okay, I haven't looked at the bit layout of an integer lately but I think it's encoded like this. If not, you still get my point right?).
So perhaps then this idea sort of works when we are aggregating lots of small calculated numbers but then switch to a traditional chip to add them together.
You see what I'm getting at? Computers don't really know that the small variation at the most significant bit is actually a huge variation.
I think there would also have to be a lot of analysis based on understanding how the variations add up and their cumulative effect. For example, a well written app under this scenario means that the errors basically average out over time as opposed to errors that blow out of proportion.
Anyways, I can think of a few good uses for this. Probably the most notable being down the DSP path (which the article metions). Our eyes probably wouldn't see small errors in an HD display during processing or hear small errors in audio processing.
This is parallel to the fact that there is less error checking in audio CDs and video DVDs than their computer counterparts CD-ROM and DVD-ROM (or the R/RW/etc.etc. counterparts).
(1) L0phtcrack and similar approaches only work well up to a certain number of characters. Otherwise, you could also brute force phrases. The article itself mentions this.
(2) L0phtcrack DOES use dictionary attacks on passwords and hence passwords with real words in it are several orders of magnitude easier to crack. Try it and you will see dictionary words get hacked, sometimes in seconds, and usually within minutes.
(3) The exclamation mark won't make a difference. I ran l0phtcrack before and it easily found passwords with exclamation marks on the end. Ironically, it was a security experts password that had this. I assume an exclamation would make a difference INSIDE a password (instead of at the end) but probably not more so than having relatively random characters as opposed to English words.
(4) I wasn't explicitly recommending this for Windows. It is just generally a good way to get passwords for websites and such which usually have a maximum limit on the number of characters you can have. In the case of Windows, the article does a good job of explaining why using an entire phrase is a good thing (which I liked).
(5) Damn you for reducing my chances at mod points! (Said in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy)
An easy way to get stronger passwords is to make them consist of the first letter of every word in a phrase. For example:
I wish I had some nachos to eat at work
would become:
IwIhsnteaw
Okay, it can still be brute force attacked but it certainly can't be efficiently dictionary hacked. Furthermore, for most of our needs, this works just fine. Add a number into the phrase and even better.
As the article mentions, passwords get hard to brute force at about 10 characters.
It's probably too late to get any mod points on this but for any of those late viewers who happen to see this...
This is something I completely did not expect. I often buy the latest and greatest thing to get an idea for trends and which ones would stick and new ideas for development. A lot of them turn out as busts but the ones that work really pay off. One of my more recent acqusitions was a 1920x1200 monitor.
It is a Samsung one that can flip into a vertical display mode.
Well, my intent was to only use it in horizontal mode. In fact, I originally bought the Mac 1920x1200 widescreen but returned it due to connector compatibility problems which they didn't document.
Anyways, I flipped the Samsung for fun and let me tell you, there is no going back. When writing software, the more vertical space you have, the more lines of code you can see at once. This improved productivity a great deal. I now always leave my monitor in vertical mode and I absolutely love it.
The funny thing though is I never thought I'd be using my monitor like this. It seemed like a gimmick or at best, useful for designers. And I am actually a graphic designer too (I used to even have a design company) and seeing a full page drastically changes the way you design as well. Anyways, if you are a programmer with cash to spare, this is a great way to improve productivity.
Ironically, the other great find on producitivity was a rectangular bookshelf (one level but wide with edges and a top) that I mounted over my computer desk. It puts all the books I need access to really close by. I found that having reference books within arms reach, easy to find greatly increased my use of the reference books and also improved productivity. I originally bought this bookshelf just to clean up my area but it turned out to have a great productivity boost.
One idea that I rarely, if ever, see addressed is that we may very well have seen the end of natural human evolution. Before you reject this idea, think about it for a moment.
I'm sure we all know how evolution works, by killing off the least efficient *versions* of our species and allowing the most efficient to breed.
Well, in first world countries anyways, EVERYBODY can breed, and live and breed again. In fact, one might argue that some of the most intelligent of our species either (a) have difficulty breeding (ahem) and certainly in many cases (b) breed later in the game. And (b) is just as significant for if one group breeds 50% more than another group, the former group becomes dominant.
Now, I'm not saying smart people necessarily breed less and that unsuccessfully people breed more and earlier but there has always been a cultural tie between career oriented people marrying later in the game.
And certainly, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection. Until the next epidemic comes out and wipes out the non-immune half of the population, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection going on anymore. I wonder how this will affect our species a thousand, ten thousand or hundred thousand years from now.
Perhaps these human augmentations are the new form of evolution for humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe too late for mod points but I had to point this out:
Your observation, while a very smart one (which I had a good chuckle over before thinking about it) doesn't take into account one very important factor. The same factor that makes water cooling work for server rooms:
The Water
Yes, adding the ice to the water would do you no good but a perfectly good setup can be made just from the water. It would even work in the kitchen next to the fridge. In fact, a better setup is to route the water directly from your tap through the fan and you'd never have to refill nor prime the hose.
Under this setup, you are transferring heat to the cold water that comes from the outside pipes into your home and then back outside your house. You could even route the water right back into the sink!
"However, Lucas, now age 60, says he won't be captaining such a ship if it ever happens."
Wow, the movie after Revenge of the Sith really is a new hope.
badah-ching!
I rarely pick up a copy of Wired magazine nowadays but the Diamond cover was just too enticing. Lots more detail for the geeks in this article including a few choice ones I picked out in response to the parent.
Read the Article Here
In response to your comments:
(1) The artificial diamonds from some techniques were too perfect compared to regular diamonds and could be identified.
(2) DeBeers did launch a campaign called the "Gem Defensive Programme." From the Wired article:
But the sudden appearance of multicarat, gem-quality synthetics has sent De Beers scrambling. Several years ago, it set up what it calls the Gem Defensive Programme - a none too subtle campaign to warn jewelers and the public about the arrival of manufactured diamonds. At no charge, the company is supplying gem labs with sophisticated machines designed to help distinguish man-made from mined stones.
(3) Diamonds grown with another technique called Chemical Vapor Disposition are indistinguishable from naturally formed diamonds. From the wired article:
To grow single-crystal diamond using chemical vapor deposition, you must first divine the exact combination of temperature, gas composition, and pressure - a "sweet spot" that results in the formation of a single crystal. Otherwise, innumerable small diamond crystals will rain down. Hitting on the single-crystal sweet spot is like locating a single grain of sand on the beach. There's only one combination among millions. In 1996, Linares found it. This June, he finally received a US patent for the process, which already is producing flawless stones.
This was a very interesting article and has made me afraid of buying diamonds. It's like buying a car and having it depreciate faster than the stock market crash.
I may be going out on a limb here, and I'm usually pretty picky about what I post (I'm a karma whore I admit it) but I just have to speak up. Am I the only one who fell in love with the 5151 style keyboards?
These were the keyboards with TWO square keyapds. That is, there is a full square set of navigation keys instead of the silly inverted-T or plus arrow keypads. In other words, it was like having two numeric keypads with one permanently with the num lock off.
Now, before all of you who are used to the inverted-T scream murder, you should really take a look at how efficient the square keypad is once you learn it. In fact, if you want to improve productivity, I suggest you unlock the num locks and get used to using the square navigation key set.
I know that I can navigate an editor or word processor at about quadruple the speed of the average person.
I can do this because I have access to more navigation keys completely by feel. I suppose you could learn the inverted keys by feel but since they are separated, I'm pretty sure this would be slower.
For example, I can go beginning of line, end of line, beginning of document (with CTRL), end of document (with CTRL), page up, page down, select document (CTRL-5/center key) and enter. It drives me nuts when people left-arrow to the beginning of the line, down-arrow down a long doc (pg down is 30x faster) etc. I just find it too slow.
Yes, I know you can just hit the num-lock key but there was something nice about having the numeric keypad there as well. I know there is also some space savings with the inverted-T, but if that is the real factor, I'd rather not have it at all. Personally, I never use it.
I may be in the minority but somehow I feel like there are other people who have found the magic performance enhancement of havng a full set of nav keys. I just tried putting my fingers on the + nav (microsoft natural keyboard) and my fingers just aren't comfortable. But with index on 4, middle on 8, thumb on 2, and ring finger on 6 with a pinky on enter, I can out-nav anybody. note: thumb for end, index for home, and ring finger for pgup/pgdn and del. Also thumb for ins (though I don't find that I use insert often).
There is near unanimous fear of "Real ID" (at least from slashDot posters).
I think it's important to point out why.
While I'm sure it appears obvious to many of us, I think others may be wondering why this is such a big deal. The fact that this bill passed seems to suggest some people (many people) don't know what the implications are.
I'm sure I'll miss some of the reasoning (feel free to add on) but here goes my take on it. As a disclaimer, I am Canadian, but I don't think that changes much:
A driver's license, like a social security number, is unique. This means we can uniquely identify a person through their driver's license.
The important differences are:
(1) A driver's license is often used as a saved form of ID while an SSN is not (except for employment purposes). This means your driver's license can be found in many places, potentially at places like your video rental shop.
(2) A driver's license is used as photo ID. This means it is on you and there are several places where the information can be grabbed. Possibly in places as innocent as a bar.
(3) A universal driver's license introduces the idea of a universal reader. Because of it being the only thing that can be reliably found on 99% of the adult population, it could become an easily scanned item to be used as a membership identifier (among other things). If this is done, a single ID can identify you in literally thousands of establishments with a paper trail that will trounce your credit card trail.
(4) When you tie in "saved everywhere", with "stealable anywhere" with "scannable anywhere/information everywhere" you've got a severe loss of privacy.
The reasoning from (1) to (4) is probably not obvious to a lot of people. That's ultimately what makes it dangerous. You get to give up your freedom but it sneaks up on you in a way that you actually agreed to it (which makes it a lot harder to complain about when it happens).
I answered this in a separate post but don't confuse a standardized format with a format that cannot adjust to the capture parameters of a camera.
For example, DTS (for home) is a digital encoding system for sound but it is very flexible. You can specify the bit depth, the encoding rate, the number of channels and the amount of compression. In other words, you can encode anything from AM radio to 6.1 (and higher I think) all in the same format.
In the same way, a RAW format could easily support multiple bit depths to match the bit depth of the camera. It could also support multiple color square patterns (though almost every camera manufactured uses the RGBG square with the exception of Sony's new camera and the Foveon sensor in Sigma cameras. Don't flog me if I missed one.).
The rest of the data could be encoded as meta data and basically are *hints* on how to decode the image anyways and are not part of the bitmap image. By hints I mean readings from ISO, shutter speed, etc.
You are perhaps confusing a standard method of encoding with a standard method of getting the best photo out of a RAW file. Certainly most cameras can encode a RAW file in the same format but each would require a different set of decoding curves to get the best picture out of it. But that is where great tools and a community willing to share processing files can be a great benefit.
With few exceptions, all digital cameras use the same type of CCD where the pixels are read in an RGBG square (red green blue green). I believe Sony has an encoding with an extra color and the Foveon sensor used in Sigma cameras reads RGB all in the space of one pixel (very cool technology and produces great results).
So a standard, at its most basic, would simply encode a certain number of brightness levels (probably set variably) for each pixel and define the color square (RGBG, RGBC (I think for Sony) and RGB in a single pixel for Sigma).
Then they could probably encode most of the rest of it as meta data like in JPEG images except the naming conventions should be standardized. For example, ISO, shutter speed, etc.
And for the guy that mentioned TIFF, TIFF has none of the encoding details like the color square needed to encode a RAW image.
By the way, the reason you want the RAW image format is that as soon as you apply any processing to a JPEG image, you lose all the quality. You can't do more than a small amount of processing (brightening/darkening/curves) before you throw the detail out of the image. If you ever did a "levels" and then saw a bunch of peaks and valleys where the missing data was stretched out, THAT is the problem with processing JPEG images.
With RAW, you might be able to pull a whole slew of details out of a part of the image which, when transferred to JPEG, all turned into a 255 brightness white pixel or a 0 dark black pixel. With proper curves, you could simulate different film stocks more easily. Doing it after its been made into a JPEG gives you sub-standard results.
I know the story is about getting manufacturers to open up their RAW formats but I think the preferred goal is to have camera manufacturers standardize on ONE format.
Note that Adobe has already developed an open raw format called DNG (Digital Negative). They have a good track record with open formats with PDF files. You may or may not like them, but you they certainly can be generated by non-Adobe products and as far as I'm aware, nobody pays any license fee for that.
Another plus for DNG is that Adobe has a free DNG converter which will convert RAW files from many popular cameras to the DNG format.
You can find more info here about DNG.
Note that Photoshop (the most common photo processor) supports RAW formats for over 80 cameras. You can See a complete list here
Damn straight. They repost stories from CNet, New York Times, Blogs and uhh... sometimes SlashDot itself.
Sorry. Sometimes you have to reach for the low hanging fruit...
Here's the interesting thing about patents and, if you are a patent expert, I realize you already know this, but I think most people don't see the true irony of patents.
The irony is: they were designed to protect the small guy from the big guy. That's right. I shall repeat. They were designed to protect the small guy from the big guy.
They did this to encourage innovation.
You see, some guy in his garage could invent the television, a big company could come along and copy it, and make billions because he has a bigger operating budget. With patents, the guy could protect his invention, and the big guys couldn't steal his idea. All of a sudden, people want to invent because they can protect their ideas.
But now the patent system has turned on its head. It essentially protects the big guys from the small guys. Probably if we looked at patents in their stricted sense, a kid in their garage could write a text editor and infringe on hundreds of patents. I realize this doesn't usually result in a lawsuit, but the system is so convoluted that the only way to understand it is to hire expensive lawyers, which small guys tend not to be able to afford. So in many cases, the small guy gives up when faced with serious opposition (think RIAA).
Okay, I will freely admit that this post is a little inflamatory and that usually lawsuits are not launched even when a patent is owned for things like using key-combinations on a keyboard. But that's not the point.
The point is this: The patent system no longer does what it was supposed to do which is encourage the creation of new ideas. If a system no longer does what it was designed to do, THAT is the definition of broken.
I'm probably not the first one who's thought of this but it seems to me that cookie abuse could be reduced dramatically without affecting most websites by doing the following:
"Disable cookies on all images that are being pulled from another domain."
That is, if a web page grabs an image from another domain (a banner, pixel, etc.) then pull it but don't send any of the cookie information for that image.
I mean isn't that the way that most developers track access across websites? You put a one-pixel image and set the cookie through there. Then by reading the http_refer, you know where they've been and associate it to a single user. To track across sites though, this pixel is usually on a separate domain than the site being accessed.
By the way, I originally thought to disable cookies on all images but realized some servers may do security checking via cookies before sending an image. But there is very little legitimate use for sending cookies on images that are outside the domain.
Also, the same could be said of ANYTHING that is pulled off a different domain including scripts, css, etc. If it is on the same domain, send the cookies. If not, then make the request but don't send the cookies.
I would say precious few sites would depend on this behavior and it shouldn't break anything except for the tracking (which we want to break). Not saying that a site couldn't be made to break on this but I can't think of many reasons why a site would.
By the way, I think cookies are great for the most part. SlashDot uses them, I use them, anything with a login (mostly) uses them. I find it humorous when people insist that cookies are evil and you shouldn't have a single one. You can just as easily fake a cookie for a session by sticking an ID in the URL which, personally, I think is worse. Now your personally identifying tracker is available for all to see.
The biggest impact Firefox will have on web development is it will increase the cost of entry into run-almost-anywhere scripted websites.
Note that I'm not saying this is bad or that there aren't good effects Firefox has (in fact, I believe it is a great browser). Just that the biggest impact on *development* is it will increase the cost of entry on scripted sites.
This may be a good or bad thing. When the web first started, it was possible to be an "HTML Expert" by doing layouts with tables. I kid you not. This was advanced at one time and people had to figure out how to do it.
With browsers having pretty much settled down (meaning that Microsoft stopped releasing new browsers and 90% market share belonged to Microsoft), the wealth of knowledge on HTML coding has grown considerably. It was hard to be an *expert* at HTML or Scripting because everyone had done it before. That said, there are some truly brilliant people at sites like QuirksMode.
Now I feel that the new direction that uber-coders are going for is *useful* DHTML scripting (also known as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model to manipulate HTML live). By useful, I don't mean a cursor with a trail of stars. I mean things like popup calendars for date selectors, rich text editors, GMail and WYSIWYG page editors with live previews.
DHTML is still hard and mostly poorly documented. Anybody who has made a rich text editor for MSIE knows that it isn't too bad anymore. There is more documentation on how to do it. Definitely not *a lot* but enough that you can find your way through it.
Try this though: Make an iframe window that simulates a regular window. Okay. Now do it so that is supports MSIE, FireFox and Safari. If you want to (eventually) support more than 75% of the market, you have to support FireFox now and I'd throw Safari on the list as it is the default browser (I think) on the Mac.
Some of the toughies are the event handlers for these browsers which are quite different. I've written code to make them both work with one code base but there is virtually no documentation on this. There are dozens of quirks not listed and the only way you can figure 'em out is through trial and error.
Okay, I know I haven't covered all my bases in making this argument, but I think the smarts you will need to be an uber-coder for DHTML just got harder. This is good because there is room for new experts. If you are a great coder, there is a chance to be a brilliant cross-browser DHTML coder. If you are strictly average (nothing wrong with that), your job may have got harder.
Ironically, code re-use on JavaScript seems to be very low.
By the way, if you need evidence that cross-browser DHTML is hard, it even took Google a while to get Firefox compatible with GMail. Think how much cash they've got.
Signing out...
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of plain English and I love the idea behind the "Plain English Campaign," but their guides are poor for a website that is advocating Plain English.
;)
Consider these lines from their guide "How to Write Plain English."
Most experts would agree that clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words.
Should read:
Make your sentences about 15 to 20 words long.
And...
However, at first you may still find yourself writing the odd long sentence, especially when trying to explain a complicated point. But most long sentences can be broken up in some way.
Should read...
If you find yourself writing a long sentence to explain a complicated point, try breaking your sentence up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, try breaking it up.
Or...
If your sentence is too long, break it up.
And...
To explain the difference between active and passive verbs, we need to look briefly at how a sentence fits together. Almost every sentence has three important parts. There are three main parts to almost every sentence:
Should be:
Well, whatever it is, it shouldn't say the same sentence twice at the end.
These are just a few examples and I'm sure one could advocate the use of the original in some situations. But read the entire article and you will see useful information and perhaps "better-than-average use of plain English" but it won't be as great as it must be for a site of this kind.
My test for well written in English is that my mind doesn't wander. I knew this wasn't great English because I sometimes found it hard to concentrate on the material. This is especially bad when I'm interested in it. IMHO, the "Elements of Style" is a better introduction to good writing.
Before you jump all over me for any badly constructed sentences in this post, remember that the standard for a "teaching plain english" article has to be much higher than a SlashDot post.
I've been trying to find the "Last Stop" for an argument for evolution for quite some time. I finally found this amazing article: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
I'm sure many of you (who wanted to know anyways) have come across this but this is the cat's meow for evolutionary arguments. It is designed to be easy to read, but it does not pander to the lowest common denominator (in fact far from it).
If you haven't read it, you WILL learn something new.
Quote: Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?
Does anybody else get the willies (shades of SCO) just hearing this? Okay, I admit it's a little knee-jerk but how many successful, in the contributes to society domain, strictly IP companies are there?
I know you were being funny, but this does open up the door for potentially running MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). The DS is an interesting platform for this since the lower screen could be used to insert quarters, push Player 1/2 start buttons, etc.
Of course, I'd really be wanting this on the PSP with its gorgeous screen (if you own one, you know what I'm talking about). Since it has a memory card (better to hold games with) it would probably be the better overall MAME platform. I'm getting excited just thinking about it.
No respect I tell ya. Here are some (admittedly selective) excerpts:
I like the definition that includes "mistress" then, for an example sentence, says "he was faithful to his woman." I can count at least three things ironic/funny about just that one definition.
lousy day for me to get mod points.
I keep hearing this over and over like it is fact, but honestly, I don't know anybody who likes brown nosing in an office environment. INCLUDING the management. I think what you are really saying is, you need to SHOW RESPECT to GET RESPECT which is pretty fair. Isn't it ironic when a manager shows respect to employees he *GETS IT* but when a tech does it to his manager, it is brown nosing.
Allow me say that I'm sure you are well-intentioned by your post, but I think you may be looking at this the wrong way.
Just as you don't expect the "corporate power chain" to understand the tech stuff, you probably don't understand all the management stuff your audience does. But life is better when you do (just as visa versa). Don't we love managers who understand the technology? Of course. But you can do the same the other way. Let me ask you, do you understand your manager's problems?
I know it is not your job to understand it, but it will help immensely. Like have your tried wording your suggestions in a manner that will appeal to management? Have you tried tying it to real numbers?
For example: By simplifying the architecture of the system, I estimate that we can reduce the time spent on fixing bugs by 50%. Also, since we are reusing code, adding more features is easier. I predict we can also write code faster by a factor of 25% because there will be more code re-use. Although this will result in an up-front investment of three months work, additional changes will be easier and faster to make. The net result is that within about 6 months, we will be in the same spot but with a better architected system. [Okay, this is NOT the report you'd write, but you get my drift]
By the way, I used to do this all the time. I'd often make reports with suggestions outlining why I recommend each aspect and what effect it will have on the business.
I'm happy when people make suggestions, but as a manager, it is HARD to do the work to the next level. For example, if you are managing 10 people, spending 30 minutes a day with each person takes five hours leaving three hours left in a day. Most managers don't have the time to figure out the logistics and they don't understand the problem as well as you do. I love it when somebody comes up to me with all the arguments thought out. THAT is easy to process.
Having been raised on tech and management principles (graduate of a business program), I can say that people who understand both the tech and the management side are the most valuable people in the company. Become one. We need more.
As a related aside, I am now the CEO of a successful and profitable Internet company. And of course, I still read slashdot.
It is an interesting idea but I think there would have to be a lot of research that goes into this and here's what I mean.
The article is right in that certain things don't need 100% accuracy and that small variations in the answers can yield very good results. This could be important when time is more important than 100% accuracy.
That said, how do we know if the variations are small? Only 1 bit can change a huge negative number into a huge positive number in a standard integer (Okay, I haven't looked at the bit layout of an integer lately but I think it's encoded like this. If not, you still get my point right?).
So perhaps then this idea sort of works when we are aggregating lots of small calculated numbers but then switch to a traditional chip to add them together.
You see what I'm getting at? Computers don't really know that the small variation at the most significant bit is actually a huge variation.
I think there would also have to be a lot of analysis based on understanding how the variations add up and their cumulative effect. For example, a well written app under this scenario means that the errors basically average out over time as opposed to errors that blow out of proportion.
Anyways, I can think of a few good uses for this. Probably the most notable being down the DSP path (which the article metions). Our eyes probably wouldn't see small errors in an HD display during processing or hear small errors in audio processing.
This is parallel to the fact that there is less error checking in audio CDs and video DVDs than their computer counterparts CD-ROM and DVD-ROM (or the R/RW/etc.etc. counterparts).
Just a few comments:
(1) L0phtcrack and similar approaches only work well up to a certain number of characters. Otherwise, you could also brute force phrases. The article itself mentions this.
(2) L0phtcrack DOES use dictionary attacks on passwords and hence passwords with real words in it are several orders of magnitude easier to crack. Try it and you will see dictionary words get hacked, sometimes in seconds, and usually within minutes.
(3) The exclamation mark won't make a difference. I ran l0phtcrack before and it easily found passwords with exclamation marks on the end. Ironically, it was a security experts password that had this. I assume an exclamation would make a difference INSIDE a password (instead of at the end) but probably not more so than having relatively random characters as opposed to English words.
(4) I wasn't explicitly recommending this for Windows. It is just generally a good way to get passwords for websites and such which usually have a maximum limit on the number of characters you can have. In the case of Windows, the article does a good job of explaining why using an entire phrase is a good thing (which I liked).
(5) Damn you for reducing my chances at mod points! (Said in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy)
An easy way to get stronger passwords is to make them consist of the first letter of every word in a phrase. For example:
I wish I had some nachos to eat at work
would become:
IwIhsnteaw
Okay, it can still be brute force attacked but it certainly can't be efficiently dictionary hacked. Furthermore, for most of our needs, this works just fine. Add a number into the phrase and even better.
As the article mentions, passwords get hard to brute force at about 10 characters.
Samsung SyncMaster 243T
;)
Enjoy it when you can.
p.s. also has RGB *and* DVI inputs.
It's probably too late to get any mod points on this but for any of those late viewers who happen to see this...
This is something I completely did not expect. I often buy the latest and greatest thing to get an idea for trends and which ones would stick and new ideas for development. A lot of them turn out as busts but the ones that work really pay off. One of my more recent acqusitions was a 1920x1200 monitor.
It is a Samsung one that can flip into a vertical display mode.
Well, my intent was to only use it in horizontal mode. In fact, I originally bought the Mac 1920x1200 widescreen but returned it due to connector compatibility problems which they didn't document.
Anyways, I flipped the Samsung for fun and let me tell you, there is no going back. When writing software, the more vertical space you have, the more lines of code you can see at once. This improved productivity a great deal. I now always leave my monitor in vertical mode and I absolutely love it.
The funny thing though is I never thought I'd be using my monitor like this. It seemed like a gimmick or at best, useful for designers. And I am actually a graphic designer too (I used to even have a design company) and seeing a full page drastically changes the way you design as well. Anyways, if you are a programmer with cash to spare, this is a great way to improve productivity.
Ironically, the other great find on producitivity was a rectangular bookshelf (one level but wide with edges and a top) that I mounted over my computer desk. It puts all the books I need access to really close by. I found that having reference books within arms reach, easy to find greatly increased my use of the reference books and also improved productivity. I originally bought this bookshelf just to clean up my area but it turned out to have a great productivity boost.
One idea that I rarely, if ever, see addressed is that we may very well have seen the end of natural human evolution. Before you reject this idea, think about it for a moment.
I'm sure we all know how evolution works, by killing off the least efficient *versions* of our species and allowing the most efficient to breed.
Well, in first world countries anyways, EVERYBODY can breed, and live and breed again. In fact, one might argue that some of the most intelligent of our species either (a) have difficulty breeding (ahem) and certainly in many cases (b) breed later in the game. And (b) is just as significant for if one group breeds 50% more than another group, the former group becomes dominant.
Now, I'm not saying smart people necessarily breed less and that unsuccessfully people breed more and earlier but there has always been a cultural tie between career oriented people marrying later in the game.
And certainly, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection. Until the next epidemic comes out and wipes out the non-immune half of the population, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of natural selection going on anymore. I wonder how this will affect our species a thousand, ten thousand or hundred thousand years from now.
Perhaps these human augmentations are the new form of evolution for humans.