In other news, it sounds like someone is going to be setting up an authlog blackhole in the near future...
Did they check their.bash_history ? The silly script kiddie that got into my RH4 box back in the 90s forgot to clean his traces there. I mean, he bothered to run "history -c " , but it didn't actually stop his session from dumping everything there again after he logged out.
At some point a few years ago Raster was talking about putting in some neat interactive stuff in the window decorations, like CPU/mem/IO utilization meters per window process and stuff like that... has any of that come to fruition?
I had an awesome E16-based "enlightenome" desktop a while ago, but I really screwed up my.enlightenment profile after trying to build my own theme, and eventually started using compiz-fusion since it had enough configurability (and eye candy too I suppose) to set up some pretty interesting application kiosks for work.
So. Slashdot will die, as it began - with dev update news on the Enlightenment project.:-)
Where's my Windowmaker submission?
Grr... I'm still looking for WindowMaker features in some of my "modern" WMs...
* Desktop naming. It had a great effect where you could name each desktop with a task or whatever (mine were usually "Main", "Web", "Graphics", and "Root") and they would flash and fade briefly onscreen whenever you switched desktops. Haven't seen any other desktop manager try to do that. I faked something like that using xosd, but that's kinda clunky and persists too long when jumping over multiple desktops.
* Clip : a desktop-sensitive dock. This is a great idea... it worked a lot like the Windows 7 taskbar does now, where an app would appear there when you're using it, and you have the option of permanently attaching it to the clip on that desktop. I'm annoyed with most docks / taskbars that get cluttered up with everything... but it makes sense to have one for each desktop, so you could have all your graphics programs in your toolchain on one desktop clip, web tools on another, admin tools on another. etc.
* WM dockapps : These little monitors were great! I mostly just using gkrellm and its plugins now, though, which is probably more efficient and flexible.
* Awesome skinability : it was ridiculously simple to create themes, for the most part it was just a background, a handful of titlebar textures, and some color selections, and it would do the rest of the work. Done!
Only reason I stopped using WM was because it didn't do compositing... I needs me my transparent xterms:P
Meh, I'd argue the opposite. I'm more worried about my neighbors snooping on me than my government. OK, and not really my immediate neighbors, but random passersby. But anyway, realizing that the network is more like a public space makes you act a bit more like you're in a public space where people can see you... and take appropriate precautions.
As mentioned in TFA, accepting that the government and ISP already has both the will and the ability to snoop on your packets should make it easier for you to take the measure of securing and encrypting your communications. Opening up your network to your neighbors only drives that point home and makes you more wary that people might be watching.
Second, law enforcement wants all of your Wifi access points "secured" because then it's straightforward to prosecute you in court for anything that comes down your pipe. If you have an open WAP, then you can say anyone else could have done it. If it's a closed access point, then as far as the court is concerned you were the only one who could have downloaded something... they don't care it's only WEP and trivial to circumvent./IANAL
Slick script that sets up all your QoS rules for you to prioritize interactive traffic over bulk traffic, makes it easy to limit bandwidth used by a "guest network" interface to an arbitrary limits to leave some headroom for your gear , etc. etc.
My Viewsonic G-Tablet is still a pretty nice piece of hardware.
Unfortunately, my Vegan-TAB ROM doesn't have the loopback device module, so I can't run "Complete Linux Installer" on it to chroot to Debian like I can on my myTouch 3G Slide runing CM7.1
Also pissed off that my new myTouch 4G Slide running CM9.1 also doesn't have a loopback device:/
Almost pissed enough to compile my own? Someday...
It's almost Halloween... I would just hook one up to a battery pack and make it part of my costume somehow. It could display the blue screen of Death! Or you could just get the t-shirt.
Maybe load a few pictures of evil-looking eyes, and hang them out in a dark corner of the yard.
Or load a few pictures of x-rays on it.. with a little rehearsal and good timing (or maybe it just has a "next photo" button). Then you can hold it in front of various 'ahem' parts of your body, and show off or something.
There are so many crappy old laptops around with nicer displays and better functionality to waste time hacking a photo frame, though.
Try "Wifi Analyzer"... it does a great job telling you what wifi access points you can see.
I just picked up an HTC myTouch 4G Slide off of Craigslist... very nice phone, and CyanogenMOD 9.1 (Android 4.1 ICS) went stable for it quite recently. You don't even need any hacks anymore to root the phone, HTC will give you the boot unlock code. http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2012/10/best-android-keyboard-phone.html
The only downside to CM9.1 so far is that the kernel doesn't have a loopback device, so I can't chroot to a full Debian using the "Complete Linux Installer" app anymore like I could under CM7:/
Hmm, I had a similar problem with my android phone once... but I'm pretty sure it was solved simply by forgetting my home network and reconnecting to it again. Haven't had any encounters with malicious hacks that I'm aware of.
It helps to have a cheap tablet to experiment with android apps... that way I don't really have any temptation to run anything on my phone other than the bare minimum of stuff. I usually run custom ROMs on all my stuff, so I'm usually upgrading CyanogenMOD or something so I wipe the OS and start fresh a couple times a year.
Otherwise, I think I'll just slap an android phone onto an ARF R/C plane and go to town... it'd be funny if the platform ends up costing less than half of the $800 ADS-B receiver it has to carry:P
Google for Redstone Circuits and go to town. There's that running EE joke that you can build any logic circuit with nothing but NOT gates. Redstone pretty much gives you exactly that.
For real programming, maybe just throw them at http://learnpython.org/ and give them an ipython shell to play with until they're ready to start programming a dungeonmaster / chatbot for their minecraft server. That's my plan with my kids (10 & 7) at the moment.
My 10 and 7 year olds are addicted to minecraft. It's difficult to get them to stop talking about it, or singing about it. And there's a great set of Minecraft parodies of popular music, mostly PG, that are certainly better than the pop songs they are based on.
It's a ridiculously simple-looking game, but there's a lot of basic stuff you can teach them from it:
They will learn how to use the internet (all the crafting guides are on the web on wikis, it's next to impossible to do much crafting without referring to them). They've learned how to navigate a little bit in BASH to get the server and client started. They're learning about texture packs and how to apply different mods to improve the behavior and graphical appearance of the game in certain ways. They're running their own local multiplayer server now, and running the console commands to gift themselves items based on the data table. They're learning to make backups and juggle their various maps between their single player sessions and multiplayer server. I've started teaching them python so they can start scripting some chatbots on the server, and to help automate some of the stuff they do. Oh, yeah, in-game we're teaching them redstone circuits too, and how they can pretty much build any logic gate out of NOT gates and timers.
The downside is that it's $26 per account (we got ours for $15 during the beta). There's an educational discount for it somewhere, if you have a teacher in the family.
ABS allows you to brake hard but maintain some steering control. Otherwise, you'll just keep sliding straight forward into some obstacle you're trying to avoid, or spin out if you hit the brakes in the middle of a curve, maybe into oncoming traffic.
I have heard that ABS increases straight-line braking distance... but I think that varies somewhat. rubber tires on various road surfaces don't exactly follow the static / kinetic friction coefficient you learned in physics, plus I suppose the ABS implementation works differently between vehicles. But I have read that professional race drivers (i.e. not you or I) can do sometimes better without ABS on both straight-line and braking in turns.
One other thing is, to participate on discussions on a page, you must "like" it.
So some of those liberals that "like" him may have "liked" him for the purposes of trolling the page.
This.
If you've ever been to either Obama's or Romney's page, all the comments are pretty much chock-full of hatin' from the other side.
I worked for Microsoft Game Studios for a while and our FB page was pretty much the same way. It was kinda nice, because all of the trolls would hang out on FB and forums... where no one would read them except for other haters. Anyone who was actually playing our game would then be pretty much free to play online relatively unmolested by trolls in-game.
Same thing with youtube... if it wasn't for youtube trolls, we'd probably have many more here:P
I'd extend it further to posit that the purpose of democracy isn't really to give its citizens anything more than an illusion that they have any impact on how things are run. Democracy is merely safeguard to prevent the established institution from being overthrown in a bloody revolution in case one of the leaders fucks up royally. Our leaders have become brilliant at straddling the line, though.
Hmm, that's sad... I'm trolling Craigslist right now for an HTC MyTouch 4G Slide to replace the current 3G Slide I'm still using now. I wish there was some newer phone with a physical keyboard that also ran Android 4.x out of the box.
I've dropped my 3G Slide so often (sometimes from the GPS mount on my bicycle while moving) it's not even funny. That killed a cheap microSD card I had once, but other than that and lots of dings and deep scratches and a missing camera cover, everything still works.
Are there any other decent slider phones I should be looking at? My other thought is to just get a Nexus 7 and a little bluetooth keyboard and a huge set of belt holsters and tether it to my existing 3G Slide (which still gets excellent "4G" HSDPA+ datalink).
Nah, that attitude sounds more like LA... it'd be right next to the "Keep honking; I'm reloading" bumper sticker. The rural hicks OTOH know how to stay within their rights by law:P
But I suppose the limiting factor for those appears to be safety, since they haven't come up with a good material to adequately contain a disintegrating flywheel in a crash yet.
I also miss the flywheel toy cars I had as a kid... you could wind them up and they would drive along on two wheels or stand on their bumper due to the gyroscopic forces. Wish I could find something similar for my kids. Could probably design something scaled up to do some interesting handling / active suspension compensation setups in real race cars if you were crazy or something.
They had metal utensils in the cafeteria back in the day. The teacher had probably mentioned something about the ground prongs of outlets not being electrified at some point, and a few of us were of course testing that as the lesson droned on. I was poking at it with a butter knife, but later on it was one of my classmates who was playing with a fork that managed to interrupt class with a fairly impressive sparks and smoke show. Good times.
Ha, yeah... I stopped using cursive around 11th grade when I noticed that the smartest girl in the class wrote her essays in wonderfully clear print. Then I noticed that I could naturally write cursive again if I just wrote fast, sloppy print without lifting my pen up all the way. Why they ever thought to teach cursive as a skill is beyond me... other than maybe that doctors were smart, and wrote sloppily, and that if we were ever to attain the same status as doctors at the time, we'd have to learn to read/write sloppily too. I'm sort of glad those times are behind us... well, except for that doctors and professors and teachers are nowadays regarded as a low class service-sector profession:P
And then there was my college roommate, who could write all of his engineering notes in crystal-clear print crammed into 1/2 - 1/4 the size of college ruled paper, so he could fit 4x - 8x more information onto each page of notes. Not a skill I could match, though.
The only other habits I picked up to make my print somewhat more readable is crossing my 7s and Zs and sometimes 0s, and curling my ls to distinguish them from 1s. It would have been neat to learn something useful like that in, say, school, though.
Ha ha, well, we ultimately did fix it, and not just by simply increasing ulimit -s . But it was not exactly a great intro to elegant programming technique using recursion:P
By the time I hit middleschool, his curriculum had been curtailed down to essentially teaching word processing.
By highschool, it was a total joke, focused around... yet more word processing.
Ha ha, somewhat ironically, one of my first significant computing device I had when I was growing up in Thailand was a word processor, albeit a somewhat nice Japanese one similar to: http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/word/0001.html
The keyboard, menus, and manual were all in Japanese, but it used lots of pictures and diagrams so I was able to muddle my way through many of the advanced editing, printing, and file management functions without knowing a single word. It was a pretty interesting introduction to thinking symbolically. Certainly was more of a challenge figuring out how to use that word processor than playing games on my old C-64 or even copying BASIC programs onto it from 3-2-1 Contact magazines:P
Hmm, that's pretty cool... I guess for whatever reason we didn't have anyone on faculty who could push to run an AP CS course... I think some of my hardcore programmer friends managed to take it anyway through some sort of partnership with the state university, but that sounded complicated.
Things couldn't have been all that bad at our HS, after all, Sergei Brin had gone through there a few years before us. But my point being was that you had to take some sort of initiative to study computer stuff back then. I'm sure things are somewhat better now in high schools after the dotcom bubble showed people that computing might be lucrative.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, it sounds like someone is going to be setting up an authlog blackhole in the near future...
Did they check their .bash_history ? The silly script kiddie that got into my RH4 box back in the 90s forgot to clean his traces there. I mean, he bothered to run "history -c " , but it didn't actually stop his session from dumping everything there again after he logged out.
Hmm, thanks for the review...
At some point a few years ago Raster was talking about putting in some neat interactive stuff in the window decorations, like CPU/mem/IO utilization meters per window process and stuff like that... has any of that come to fruition?
I had an awesome E16-based "enlightenome" desktop a while ago, but I really screwed up my .enlightenment profile after trying to build my own theme, and eventually started using compiz-fusion since it had enough configurability (and eye candy too I suppose) to set up some pretty interesting application kiosks for work.
So. Slashdot will die, as it began - with dev update news on the Enlightenment project. :-)
Where's my Windowmaker submission?
Grr... I'm still looking for WindowMaker features in some of my "modern" WMs...
* Desktop naming. It had a great effect where you could name each desktop with a task or whatever (mine were usually "Main", "Web", "Graphics", and "Root") and they would flash and fade briefly onscreen whenever you switched desktops. Haven't seen any other desktop manager try to do that. I faked something like that using xosd, but that's kinda clunky and persists too long when jumping over multiple desktops.
* Clip : a desktop-sensitive dock. This is a great idea... it worked a lot like the Windows 7 taskbar does now, where an app would appear there when you're using it, and you have the option of permanently attaching it to the clip on that desktop. I'm annoyed with most docks / taskbars that get cluttered up with everything... but it makes sense to have one for each desktop, so you could have all your graphics programs in your toolchain on one desktop clip, web tools on another, admin tools on another. etc.
* WM dockapps : These little monitors were great! I mostly just using gkrellm and its plugins now, though, which is probably more efficient and flexible.
* Awesome skinability : it was ridiculously simple to create themes, for the most part it was just a background, a handful of titlebar textures, and some color selections, and it would do the rest of the work. Done!
Only reason I stopped using WM was because it didn't do compositing... I needs me my transparent xterms :P
Meh, I'd argue the opposite. I'm more worried about my neighbors snooping on me than my government. OK, and not really my immediate neighbors, but random passersby. But anyway, realizing that the network is more like a public space makes you act a bit more like you're in a public space where people can see you... and take appropriate precautions.
As mentioned in TFA, accepting that the government and ISP already has both the will and the ability to snoop on your packets should make it easier for you to take the measure of securing and encrypting your communications. Opening up your network to your neighbors only drives that point home and makes you more wary that people might be watching.
Second, law enforcement wants all of your Wifi access points "secured" because then it's straightforward to prosecute you in court for anything that comes down your pipe. If you have an open WAP, then you can say anyone else could have done it. If it's a closed access point, then as far as the court is concerned you were the only one who could have downloaded something... they don't care it's only WEP and trivial to circumvent. /IANAL
Or for the lazy: http://lartc.org/wondershaper/
Slick script that sets up all your QoS rules for you to prioritize interactive traffic over bulk traffic, makes it easy to limit bandwidth used by a "guest network" interface to an arbitrary limits to leave some headroom for your gear , etc. etc.
Some examples:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/use-bandwidth-shapers-wondershaper-or-trickle-to-limit-internet-connection-speed.html
My Viewsonic G-Tablet is still a pretty nice piece of hardware.
Unfortunately, my Vegan-TAB ROM doesn't have the loopback device module, so I can't run "Complete Linux Installer" on it to chroot to Debian like I can on my myTouch 3G Slide runing CM7.1
Also pissed off that my new myTouch 4G Slide running CM9.1 also doesn't have a loopback device :/
Almost pissed enough to compile my own? Someday...
Heh, I like that!
It's almost Halloween... I would just hook one up to a battery pack and make it part of my costume somehow. It could display the blue screen of Death! Or you could just get the t-shirt.
Maybe load a few pictures of evil-looking eyes, and hang them out in a dark corner of the yard.
Or load a few pictures of x-rays on it.. with a little rehearsal and good timing (or maybe it just has a "next photo" button). Then you can hold it in front of various 'ahem' parts of your body, and show off or something.
There are so many crappy old laptops around with nicer displays and better functionality to waste time hacking a photo frame, though.
Try "Wifi Analyzer" ... it does a great job telling you what wifi access points you can see.
I just picked up an HTC myTouch 4G Slide off of Craigslist... very nice phone, and CyanogenMOD 9.1 (Android 4.1 ICS) went stable for it quite recently. You don't even need any hacks anymore to root the phone, HTC will give you the boot unlock code.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2012/10/best-android-keyboard-phone.html
The only downside to CM9.1 so far is that the kernel doesn't have a loopback device, so I can't chroot to a full Debian using the "Complete Linux Installer" app anymore like I could under CM7 :/
Hmm, I had a similar problem with my android phone once... but I'm pretty sure it was solved simply by forgetting my home network and reconnecting to it again. Haven't had any encounters with malicious hacks that I'm aware of.
It helps to have a cheap tablet to experiment with android apps... that way I don't really have any temptation to run anything on my phone other than the bare minimum of stuff. I usually run custom ROMs on all my stuff, so I'm usually upgrading CyanogenMOD or something so I wipe the OS and start fresh a couple times a year.
Here's a more interesting read of NASA's competition rules [DRAFT] :
http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/eps/eps_data/154025-OTHER-001-001.pdf
... and are you hiring? :-D
Otherwise, I think I'll just slap an android phone onto an ARF R/C plane and go to town... it'd be funny if the platform ends up costing less than half of the $800 ADS-B receiver it has to carry :P
Google for Redstone Circuits and go to town. There's that running EE joke that you can build any logic circuit with nothing but NOT gates. Redstone pretty much gives you exactly that.
For real programming, maybe just throw them at http://learnpython.org/ and give them an ipython shell to play with until they're ready to start programming a dungeonmaster / chatbot for their minecraft server. That's my plan with my kids (10 & 7) at the moment.
Seconded.
My 10 and 7 year olds are addicted to minecraft. It's difficult to get them to stop talking about it, or singing about it. And there's a great set of Minecraft parodies of popular music, mostly PG, that are certainly better than the pop songs they are based on.
It's a ridiculously simple-looking game, but there's a lot of basic stuff you can teach them from it:
They will learn how to use the internet (all the crafting guides are on the web on wikis, it's next to impossible to do much crafting without referring to them). They've learned how to navigate a little bit in BASH to get the server and client started. They're learning about texture packs and how to apply different mods to improve the behavior and graphical appearance of the game in certain ways. They're running their own local multiplayer server now, and running the console commands to gift themselves items based on the data table. They're learning to make backups and juggle their various maps between their single player sessions and multiplayer server. I've started teaching them python so they can start scripting some chatbots on the server, and to help automate some of the stuff they do. Oh, yeah, in-game we're teaching them redstone circuits too, and how they can pretty much build any logic gate out of NOT gates and timers.
The downside is that it's $26 per account (we got ours for $15 during the beta). There's an educational discount for it somewhere, if you have a teacher in the family.
A bunch more children's gaming recommendations (Web, Windows, Linux, Android) I've been tracking are at: http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2012/08/best-games-for-children.html
Parent should be modded up.
ABS allows you to brake hard but maintain some steering control. Otherwise, you'll just keep sliding straight forward into some obstacle you're trying to avoid, or spin out if you hit the brakes in the middle of a curve, maybe into oncoming traffic.
I have heard that ABS increases straight-line braking distance... but I think that varies somewhat. rubber tires on various road surfaces don't exactly follow the static / kinetic friction coefficient you learned in physics, plus I suppose the ABS implementation works differently between vehicles. But I have read that professional race drivers (i.e. not you or I) can do sometimes better without ABS on both straight-line and braking in turns.
One other thing is, to participate on discussions on a page, you must "like" it.
So some of those liberals that "like" him may have "liked" him for the purposes of trolling the page.
This.
If you've ever been to either Obama's or Romney's page, all the comments are pretty much chock-full of hatin' from the other side.
I worked for Microsoft Game Studios for a while and our FB page was pretty much the same way. It was kinda nice, because all of the trolls would hang out on FB and forums... where no one would read them except for other haters. Anyone who was actually playing our game would then be pretty much free to play online relatively unmolested by trolls in-game.
Same thing with youtube... if it wasn't for youtube trolls, we'd probably have many more here :P
Sounds good.
I'd extend it further to posit that the purpose of democracy isn't really to give its citizens anything more than an illusion that they have any impact on how things are run. Democracy is merely safeguard to prevent the established institution from being overthrown in a bloody revolution in case one of the leaders fucks up royally. Our leaders have become brilliant at straddling the line, though.
Hmm, that's sad... I'm trolling Craigslist right now for an HTC MyTouch 4G Slide to replace the current 3G Slide I'm still using now. I wish there was some newer phone with a physical keyboard that also ran Android 4.x out of the box.
I've dropped my 3G Slide so often (sometimes from the GPS mount on my bicycle while moving) it's not even funny. That killed a cheap microSD card I had once, but other than that and lots of dings and deep scratches and a missing camera cover, everything still works.
Are there any other decent slider phones I should be looking at? My other thought is to just get a Nexus 7 and a little bluetooth keyboard and a huge set of belt holsters and tether it to my existing 3G Slide (which still gets excellent "4G" HSDPA+ datalink).
Nah, that attitude sounds more like LA... it'd be right next to the "Keep honking; I'm reloading" bumper sticker. The rural hicks OTOH know how to stay within their rights by law :P
Have any of you people ever even been to the sticks? All the signs I've ever seen there say: "TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT; SURVIVORS WILL BE PROSECUTED"
I think I read about it on /. at some point.
I'm more excited about using high-speed flywheels to store and release energy. They use it on some buses and special-purpose racecars supposedly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
But I suppose the limiting factor for those appears to be safety, since they haven't come up with a good material to adequately contain a disintegrating flywheel in a crash yet.
I also miss the flywheel toy cars I had as a kid... you could wind them up and they would drive along on two wheels or stand on their bumper due to the gyroscopic forces. Wish I could find something similar for my kids. Could probably design something scaled up to do some interesting handling / active suspension compensation setups in real race cars if you were crazy or something.
They had metal utensils in the cafeteria back in the day. The teacher had probably mentioned something about the ground prongs of outlets not being electrified at some point, and a few of us were of course testing that as the lesson droned on. I was poking at it with a butter knife, but later on it was one of my classmates who was playing with a fork that managed to interrupt class with a fairly impressive sparks and smoke show. Good times.
Ha, yeah... I stopped using cursive around 11th grade when I noticed that the smartest girl in the class wrote her essays in wonderfully clear print. Then I noticed that I could naturally write cursive again if I just wrote fast, sloppy print without lifting my pen up all the way. Why they ever thought to teach cursive as a skill is beyond me... other than maybe that doctors were smart, and wrote sloppily, and that if we were ever to attain the same status as doctors at the time, we'd have to learn to read/write sloppily too. I'm sort of glad those times are behind us... well, except for that doctors and professors and teachers are nowadays regarded as a low class service-sector profession :P
And then there was my college roommate, who could write all of his engineering notes in crystal-clear print crammed into 1/2 - 1/4 the size of college ruled paper, so he could fit 4x - 8x more information onto each page of notes. Not a skill I could match, though.
The only other habits I picked up to make my print somewhat more readable is crossing my 7s and Zs and sometimes 0s, and curling my ls to distinguish them from 1s. It would have been neat to learn something useful like that in, say, school, though.
Ha ha, well, we ultimately did fix it, and not just by simply increasing ulimit -s . But it was not exactly a great intro to elegant programming technique using recursion :P
By the time I hit middleschool, his curriculum had been curtailed down to essentially teaching word processing.
By highschool, it was a total joke, focused around... yet more word processing.
Ha ha, somewhat ironically, one of my first significant computing device I had when I was growing up in Thailand was a word processor, albeit a somewhat nice Japanese one similar to:
http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/word/0001.html
The keyboard, menus, and manual were all in Japanese, but it used lots of pictures and diagrams so I was able to muddle my way through many of the advanced editing, printing, and file management functions without knowing a single word. It was a pretty interesting introduction to thinking symbolically. Certainly was more of a challenge figuring out how to use that word processor than playing games on my old C-64 or even copying BASIC programs onto it from 3-2-1 Contact magazines :P
Hmm, that's pretty cool... I guess for whatever reason we didn't have anyone on faculty who could push to run an AP CS course... I think some of my hardcore programmer friends managed to take it anyway through some sort of partnership with the state university, but that sounded complicated.
Things couldn't have been all that bad at our HS, after all, Sergei Brin had gone through there a few years before us. But my point being was that you had to take some sort of initiative to study computer stuff back then. I'm sure things are somewhat better now in high schools after the dotcom bubble showed people that computing might be lucrative.