The high school I went to (a private school in Maryland) adopted Linux about four years ago, but for use as a network server. They had it in a closet, hooked up to an array of six 56K modems. The modems were load-balanced together to provide a pseudo-broadband connection MacGuyver would have been proud of.
They saved a lot of money with Linux, but probably lost it all again due to the contractor the clueless Admin used to cobble it together. GAH.
(Side note: A few friends and I offered to do the networking and Linux admin for them, but our FREE proposal was turned down due to "security concerns." Of course, later, we rebooted the Linux box into single-user mode and added ourselves a root account, but that's another story)
JonKatz's review is "Offtopic." However, let me bring this article into Slashdot's realm of coverage by pointing out an issue related to Your Rights:
If you have a DVR or can otherwise record the TV teaser for this movie in a high-quality way, check out the scene where the woman in a dress falls through the stairs.
Just after they switch to a shot looking down on her (or more likely, her stunt-double) falling into the abyss, there are about 6 frames where her dress most obviously should hike up to the point of heavy undergarment exposure. However it is quite obvious that someone whipped out the Paintbrush tool and did a ridiculously fake-looking, blurry censorship job.
This was only a guess until I dropped my TiVo remote and punched up www.apple.com. I visited their generous selection of trailers and viewed the same footage through the wonders of Broadband. Frame-by-framing with the Quicktime viewer, I located the same set of frames and confirmed that, in fact, the online version displays a great deal of unadulterated Good Old White Cotton American Freedom.
This posting is not intended as an exercise in lechery but instead as an anchor, attaching in some small way this obviously matter-free, nerd-unrelated article to the Slashdot favorite topic, Censorship.
JonKatz should thank me. No personal checks, plesae.
They don't use the Video for Linux API. They have an IBM MPEG chip on board and have written custom software to feed the data streams to it. Quite nice, really.
"The money is made farther down the food chain," Mr. Varrone said. The pirated software soon reaches distributors who find a ready market, the officials said.
Warez is illegal as it is. I don't feel that the government needs to make things up to convince people that it is evil. No one is making any considerable amount of money on distributing warez.
I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have at least one piece of illegal software on their computer. And I don't think I know anyone who doesn't KNOW it's illegal. IMHO, this kind of crap just loses the government credibility in my book, and does little or nothing for their public image.
BTW: Anyone notice the similarity between this article and those discussing the Taliban? Warez is a "loosely affiliated group" with "units" acting all over the world. *snort*
I worked at eGrail, whose flagship product is coded in a mixture of both PHP and Perl. Web user interface is in PHP with a fast internal parsing system written in Perl.
There are definite advantages to this design; PHP is probably the easiest language in which to write a web GUI, and Perl greatly simplified the process of building the incredibly complex parser.
The disadvantages: eGrail has (or at least had) a ridiculously long list of dependencies; one needed both a working web server with PHP4 and many extensions, not to mention Perl 5 with a host of 3rd party modules. TWO seperate database interface libraries are required.
I think it was a good thing for eGrail, but it's a carefully balanced tradeoff.
Burritos are the answer. I worked at a dotcom startup and between the sustainence wages, insane hours and daily grillings by management, the only thing that made it worthwile was our daily trips to Chipotle Mexican Grill for lunch.
Imagine, the whole development team sitting around a brushed aluminum table inhaling chunks of delectable foil-wrapped burrito. Dollops of sour cream sail gracefully over the tabletop as massive cylindrical food units are consumed voraciously.
Yes, we only really connected over lunch. And then just tenuously, at best. Sad, true, but very tasty.
Please. The obsession with quirky, new and different things is a primary element of human nature.
It makes me laugh that you use these words with disdain, when most people -- or at least geeks (and probably you, if you'd admit it to yourself) thrive -- no, LIVE on this stuff. New things, quirky things and different things are, to my knowledge, subsets of the class called "interesting things..."
The desire to do, learn or be part of something new or odd is precisely what has powered the whole hacker culture from the beginning. Think about it for a minute...
And as for marketing -- You're on the right track. The theory behind marketing is that people like interesting things. But your logic is transductive; you seem to be condemning ALL new or different ideas.;)
I agree that building on what we have is important, but what if we realize that what we have has become a giant, messy, bloated crapfest, or just that there might be a better way to start? I'll take my BMW Z3 and you can just keep developing a better horse feed to make your carriage run faster.
Even good movies often have their sound recorded seperately. Location dialogue often sounds like crap, so they use ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement) to record the same lines in a controlled environment. Lip sync is aided by computers.
Actors dubbing these low-budget imports into English aren't so careful and don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to help 'em get it right.
A few years back, I had a mini-tower shipped to me via UPS. When I received it, the CPU had been wrenched loose from its ZIF socket and had clanged around the case until ALL of the pins were bent.
I took a photo of it for insurance purposes, put on my glasses and went at it with a pair of tweezers.
Two hours and much sweating later, I plugged the CPU in and the system booted great. But it was a lesson in proper shipping...
Ahhh.. I see. Yeah, povray code freaked me out too when I first saw it. A "scene description language.." VRML looks sort of like that too.
The cool thing is that all raytracers, as far as I know, take input like this. It's just that povray exposes it in a semi-readable symbolic format. When you push the Render button in 3DS MAX, or whatever, there is an intermediate format - basically lists of objects, polygons, transformations and attributes - that it uses to generate the image in memory.
They make connectors. Since when do connectors comprise 99% of PC parts?;) Not to mention Foxconn has production facilities in Scotland, the UK, Ireland, and the US as well.
Now, if you factor in the 96 other suppliers of parts to your Compaq PC, the China Factor goes up considerably... But still nowhere near 99%.
I am fully convinced that Gamecube will become the dominant game system when it comes out. However, both this and the original Nintendo model have a big problem: They are shaped like toasters!
The taller they get, the more difficult they are to integrate into a stereo/home theater system. These devices will not fit ANYWHERE.
It boggles the mind. Sorry for the somewhat off-topic rant, but, AARGH.
All of the alternative means of communication you listed are peer-to-peer, while a TV broadcast is just that, a broadcast. This jerk is supposed to have THOUSANDS of minions all over the world.
While I am annoyed as anyone about having my access to information limited, I must disagree with your statement that embedding messages in a TV broadcast is "stupid" in this case.
To anyone still developing apps for the Newton (Amazingly enough, there are a lot of us stubborn buggers out here), the Newton Toolkit development environment does not work under OS X 10.1..
20-20 vision is required for fighter pilots. I have no qualms about requiring color vision for programmers. Everyone does not need to be a programmer
Yes, but the set of people who want to be programmers and the set of colorblind people are NOT the same.
I am a colorblind programmer. I program in C, PHP, and Perl regularly. I have no qualms with users that, endowed with color vision, enhance their programming abilities by using colorized editors. My coworkers, who all use syntax highlighting, come to my black and white display and squint at the screen, almost unable to read the code displayed.
However, the sentiment embodied here is truly ugly. I mean does this guy have any idea how frustrated potential fighter pilots feel when they are struck down by their imperfect vision? If you want to fly a plane to defend your country and ideals, the inability to do so caused by an imperfection beyond your control would be devastating.
There are a myriad of alternatives. Even within Forth it would be possible to represent the structures currently shown as color with other types of highlighting. Moore, get a clue.
You said that "barely half the people out there bother."
Unfortunately, I think that a great deal - possibly even a majority - of those affected by these worms had a greater problem than apathy; The first time they heard about the potential problem was when their machine was attacked!
By a small sample informal survey (read: I asked around my office & friends) only about 10% of IIS users received some official notification of the problem, 20% more heard it from TV news, and the rest were blindsided by it upon attack. This is not good.
What's more, the "official" notifications received were not strongly worded like the one presented above; In order to save face, the parties involved were compelled to downplay the importance of the patch and selectively omit some of the consequences of not applying it. True, the messages suggested that the patch be installed as soon as possible, but they contained yawn-inducing language that basically created the impression that this was a theoretical problem that nobody would be exploiting any time soon. Were I an average IIS user, I probably wouldn't have installed it either.
From a business standpoint, this is entirely understandable. It still, however, sucks.
If it IS meant for ET, consider the following hurdles to its decoding..
How to read a disc with microscopic pits? Perhaps they have never done spinning optical media. Maybe they'll try to read it like a record with a nanomachined stylus?
The 8-bit byte
Skipping or understanding the TOC and other headers
The ASCII character set
The alphabet
And after they've spent years on it, what have they got? A list of Slashdot readers! Perhaps NASA will preface the list with "The following people hate your extraterrestrial guts and should be evaporated first upon invasion:"
The company I work for sells some Gold CDs, whose aluminum surface is coated with a layer of 24kt gold.
The label that produced these advertises them as sounding better, which is dubious in my mind. However, does anyone know whether this would protect them from fungal infestation?
Slashdot Mirror
The high school I went to (a private school in Maryland) adopted Linux about four years ago, but for use as a network server. They had it in a closet, hooked up to an array of six 56K modems. The modems were load-balanced together to provide a pseudo-broadband connection MacGuyver would have been proud of.
They saved a lot of money with Linux, but probably lost it all again due to the contractor the clueless Admin used to cobble it together. GAH.
(Side note: A few friends and I offered to do the networking and Linux admin for them, but our FREE proposal was turned down due to "security concerns." Of course, later, we rebooted the Linux box into single-user mode and added ourselves a root account, but that's another story)
Justin
JonKatz's review is "Offtopic." However, let me bring this article into Slashdot's realm of coverage by pointing out an issue related to Your Rights:
If you have a DVR or can otherwise record the TV teaser for this movie in a high-quality way, check out the scene where the woman in a dress falls through the stairs.
Just after they switch to a shot looking down on her (or more likely, her stunt-double) falling into the abyss, there are about 6 frames where her dress most obviously should hike up to the point of heavy undergarment exposure. However it is quite obvious that someone whipped out the Paintbrush tool and did a ridiculously fake-looking, blurry censorship job.
This was only a guess until I dropped my TiVo remote and punched up www.apple.com. I visited their generous selection of trailers and viewed the same footage through the wonders of Broadband. Frame-by-framing with the Quicktime viewer, I located the same set of frames and confirmed that, in fact, the online version displays a great deal of unadulterated Good Old White Cotton American Freedom.
This posting is not intended as an exercise in lechery but instead as an anchor, attaching in some small way this obviously matter-free, nerd-unrelated article to the Slashdot favorite topic, Censorship.
JonKatz should thank me. No personal checks, plesae.
They don't use the Video for Linux API. They have an IBM MPEG chip on board and have written custom software to feed the data streams to it. Quite nice, really.
Justin
Another favorite is to invite people to #2,000 or another similar channel. This causes ircii-based clients to leave all open channels.
/sign yournamehere" ... where /sign is short for /SIGNOFF which is an alias for /QUIT... ;)
Also telling people to "sign the guestbook, just type
Justin
Warez is illegal as it is. I don't feel that the government needs to make things up to convince people that it is evil. No one is making any considerable amount of money on distributing warez.
I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have at least one piece of illegal software on their computer. And I don't think I know anyone who doesn't KNOW it's illegal. IMHO, this kind of crap just loses the government credibility in my book, and does little or nothing for their public image.
BTW: Anyone notice the similarity between this article and those discussing the Taliban? Warez is a "loosely affiliated group" with "units" acting all over the world. *snort*
Bah!
Justin
There are definite advantages to this design; PHP is probably the easiest language in which to write a web GUI, and Perl greatly simplified the process of building the incredibly complex parser.
The disadvantages: eGrail has (or at least had) a ridiculously long list of dependencies; one needed both a working web server with PHP4 and many extensions, not to mention Perl 5 with a host of 3rd party modules. TWO seperate database interface libraries are required.
I think it was a good thing for eGrail, but it's a carefully balanced tradeoff.
Justin
Subsistence wages, even. Drat.
Justin
Burritos are the answer. I worked at a dotcom startup and between the sustainence wages, insane hours and daily grillings by management, the only thing that made it worthwile was our daily trips to Chipotle Mexican Grill for lunch.
Imagine, the whole development team sitting around a brushed aluminum table inhaling chunks of delectable foil-wrapped burrito. Dollops of sour cream sail gracefully over the tabletop as massive cylindrical food units are consumed voraciously.
Yes, we only really connected over lunch. And then just tenuously, at best. Sad, true, but very tasty.
Justin
Please. The obsession with quirky, new and different things is a primary element of human nature.
;)
It makes me laugh that you use these words with disdain, when most people -- or at least geeks (and probably you, if you'd admit it to yourself) thrive -- no, LIVE on this stuff. New things, quirky things and different things are, to my knowledge, subsets of the class called "interesting things..."
The desire to do, learn or be part of something new or odd is precisely what has powered the whole hacker culture from the beginning. Think about it for a minute...
And as for marketing -- You're on the right track. The theory behind marketing is that people like interesting things. But your logic is transductive; you seem to be condemning ALL new or different ideas.
I agree that building on what we have is important, but what if we realize that what we have has become a giant, messy, bloated crapfest, or just that there might be a better way to start? I'll take my BMW Z3 and you can just keep developing a better horse feed to make your carriage run faster.
Justin
Even good movies often have their sound recorded seperately. Location dialogue often sounds like crap, so they use ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement) to record the same lines in a controlled environment. Lip sync is aided by computers.
Actors dubbing these low-budget imports into English aren't so careful and don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to help 'em get it right.
Justin
A few years back, I had a mini-tower shipped to me via UPS. When I received it, the CPU had been wrenched loose from its ZIF socket and had clanged around the case until ALL of the pins were bent.
I took a photo of it for insurance purposes, put on my glasses and went at it with a pair of tweezers.
Two hours and much sweating later, I plugged the CPU in and the system booted great. But it was a lesson in proper shipping...
Justin
One, er, two, uhh, 5 words.
;)
WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness.
(No, I don't want to buy the Windows version to play the same game I already own
Ahhh.. I see. Yeah, povray code freaked me out too when I first saw it. A "scene description language.." VRML looks sort of like that too.
The cool thing is that all raytracers, as far as I know, take input like this. It's just that povray exposes it in a semi-readable symbolic format. When you push the Render button in 3DS MAX, or whatever, there is an intermediate format - basically lists of objects, polygons, transformations and attributes - that it uses to generate the image in memory.
Justin
Say... The Linux kernel, and povray for that matter, ran just fine on Transmeta BEFORE icc came out. You just compiled them with gcc.
;)
The only thing different here is that they run a bit faster!
Exactly how much did you learn about Transmeta before you bought their stock?
Justin
He's compiling a raytracer; A 3-D rendering program designed to take instructions and create an image from them.
The point here is that the raytracer code generated by icc is more tuned; it's optimized and can do its job faster.
Justin
They make connectors. Since when do connectors comprise 99% of PC parts? ;) Not to mention Foxconn has production facilities in Scotland, the UK, Ireland, and the US as well.
Now, if you factor in the 96 other suppliers of parts to your Compaq PC, the China Factor goes up considerably... But still nowhere near 99%.
Justin
I am fully convinced that Gamecube will become the dominant game system when it comes out. However, both this and the original Nintendo model have a big problem: They are shaped like toasters!
The taller they get, the more difficult they are to integrate into a stereo/home theater system. These devices will not fit ANYWHERE.
It boggles the mind. Sorry for the somewhat off-topic rant, but, AARGH.
Justin
The definition of lose in the most relevant context is:
1. [very common] To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
By that definition, Windows loses millions of times around the world daily. My Linux machine has been up for more than 6 months. :)
Justin
All of the alternative means of communication you listed are peer-to-peer, while a TV broadcast is just that, a broadcast. This jerk is supposed to have THOUSANDS of minions all over the world.
While I am annoyed as anyone about having my access to information limited, I must disagree with your statement that embedding messages in a TV broadcast is "stupid" in this case.
To anyone still developing apps for the Newton (Amazingly enough, there are a lot of us stubborn buggers out here), the Newton Toolkit development environment does not work under OS X 10.1..
"Unknown Error"
Upgrade from earlier X versions at your own risk.
And I'm sure your subscribers enjoy all the little ads tacked on to every message. :)
Yes, but the set of people who want to be programmers and the set of colorblind people are NOT the same.
I am a colorblind programmer. I program in C, PHP, and Perl regularly. I have no qualms with users that, endowed with color vision, enhance their programming abilities by using colorized editors. My coworkers, who all use syntax highlighting, come to my black and white display and squint at the screen, almost unable to read the code displayed.
However, the sentiment embodied here is truly ugly. I mean does this guy have any idea how frustrated potential fighter pilots feel when they are struck down by their imperfect vision? If you want to fly a plane to defend your country and ideals, the inability to do so caused by an imperfection beyond your control would be devastating.
There are a myriad of alternatives. Even within Forth it would be possible to represent the structures currently shown as color with other types of highlighting. Moore, get a clue.
Justin
You said that "barely half the people out there bother."
Unfortunately, I think that a great deal - possibly even a majority - of those affected by these worms had a greater problem than apathy; The first time they heard about the potential problem was when their machine was attacked!
By a small sample informal survey (read: I asked around my office & friends) only about 10% of IIS users received some official notification of the problem, 20% more heard it from TV news, and the rest were blindsided by it upon attack. This is not good.
What's more, the "official" notifications received were not strongly worded like the one presented above; In order to save face, the parties involved were compelled to downplay the importance of the patch and selectively omit some of the consequences of not applying it. True, the messages suggested that the patch be installed as soon as possible, but they contained yawn-inducing language that basically created the impression that this was a theoretical problem that nobody would be exploiting any time soon. Were I an average IIS user, I probably wouldn't have installed it either.
From a business standpoint, this is entirely understandable. It still, however, sucks.
- How to read a disc with microscopic pits? Perhaps they have never done spinning optical media. Maybe they'll try to read it like a record with a nanomachined stylus?
- The 8-bit byte
- Skipping or understanding the TOC and other headers
- The ASCII character set
- The alphabet
And after they've spent years on it, what have they got? A list of Slashdot readers! Perhaps NASA will preface the list with "The following people hate your extraterrestrial guts and should be evaporated first upon invasion:"The company I work for sells some Gold CDs, whose aluminum surface is coated with a layer of 24kt gold.
The label that produced these advertises them as sounding better, which is dubious in my mind. However, does anyone know whether this would protect them from fungal infestation?
- Justin, currently dousing his DVDs in Monistat