I agree. When I saw them talking about the "mammoth" 80MB download, I thought for a moment that maybe they had left off a zero, and really meant its 800MB download size. 80MB wouldn't be much fun to suck down over a 56k dialup, but it's certainly not that bad. I used to get much larger files than that over a modem, by just letting them go overnight.
OO.org needs work, there's no doubt about it, but I think it would be a little sad to see time and money poured into reducing the size of the code on-disk when it could be used to make the program faster or the hardware requirements less strict.
I'm sure there are probably a handful of people around browsing the internet over a 9600 baud dialup connection, for whom an 80MB download is a deal-breaker (and who are mysteriously unable to ask a friend to download and burn it to a CD for them). But seriously, there have to be higher priorities than addressing that issue, especially since OO.org's competition -- MS Office -- can't be downloaded legally at all.
Your differentiation between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" is artificial, and to admit it is basically to surrender the argument in favor of intelligent design peremptorily. What you are calling 'macro-evolution' can easily be described as the sum of many 'micro-evolution' events, taken over time; there is nothing to suggest that they are in any ways different processes.
However, this argument is a red herring to begin with, because whether evolution or Intelligent Design is falsifiable isn't the issue: the problem is that Intelligent Design doesn't offer an explanation for the origin of life. All it does is provide an explanation for human (and other Earthly) life, by attributing its origins, or at least evolutionary progress, to some outside agent. By not explaining the origin of this outside agent as well, it presents a chicken-and-egg problem. If some sort of 'intelligence' was required in order to 'design' the mammalian eye, than certainly this superior intelligence could not have arisen through evolution, as it must certainly be more complex even than we are; therefore it must have been designed by a yet superior intelligence, and so on and so forth.
This circularity problem is only solved -- rather conveniently in my mind, given the proponents of Intelligent Design: mostly Christians -- by a "god hypothesis," the invocation of some sort of ultimate, superior being for which there is no other evidence besides I.D. theory itself. Of course the I.D. theory which is currently being pushed stops just short of this declaration, but it is rather self-evident to any bright student, once you start going down the creationist path.
Intelligent Design isn't a bad theory because of falsifibility, it's a bad theory because it involves the creation of an outside agent to explain processes for which there are simpler, non-externally-dependent explanations, and then does nothing to explain the outside agent which it invokes. In general, where other theories have an internally and logically consistent process, Intelligent Design simply draws a question mark, shrugs, and with a wink and a nudge, points to the Bible.
I received several IMs in one night a few days ago from people on my buddy list that were just URLs to executable files; they tended to be identical messages sent every 10 minutes or so and there would not be any response when I messaged them. Here are a two examples from the iChat log (the names have been removed):
10/28/05, 12:07 AM [buddy1]: load http://home.earthlink.net/~two4tea/mc-110-12-00000 80.exe mc-110-12-0000080.exe 1 -s
No real attempt at subtlety there, just "load"... I have no idea what the "1 -s" flags are all about either, perhaps someone can explain? This doesn't look as much like a social-engineering exploit ("Check this out!!1 [link]") as it does an attempt to actually issue some sort of command to the remote machine, although I assume (hope?) that's impossible, even on Windows.
10/28/05, 6:41 PM [buddy2]: http://home.earthlink.net/~icebaby123/PIC0400.com
[buddy2] has gone offline.
This link is also now dead, thankfully; however the behavior of the sender was slightly different. Rather than sending the same message multiple times they instead sent just the link alone and then signed off rapidly. This second one is behavior I've seen before so I don't think it's a new worm, the command-like structure of the first one though is something I haven't seen -- although it's not as if I really have spent any time looking into this. It was just a new one on me though, which is why I bothered to download the file and look through it with a hex editor, although to my untrained eyes there wasn't anything interesting to see in there.
Now, the question is whether people who get infected learn their lesson...that's what I'd like to see.
I doubt it. Most really clueless people will never know that their PC has been rooted, they'll just eventually notice that it's slower than crap (because it's saturating their 1Mb/s cable modem line with packets as part of a DDoS attack) and when it finally becomes unbearable, call GeekSquad or take it down to CompUSA to have it reformatted.
Then they'll start using it again, eventually become re-infected, wait until the computer becomes unusably slow or unstable, get it reformatted again.
I know more people than I'd like to admit who go through this cycle, usually about once every six months or so. A lot of people just figure that totally hosing your hard drive and doing an OS reinstall from system CDs or a protected recovery partition is necessary "maintenance," like changing the oil in a car. You use a computer for a while, the workings get all clogged up inside, and need to be cleaned out...so you drain out the dirty data, replace the OS with a fresh copy, and copy in new fresh data from backups.
Actually it's more like the old adage about taking candy from strangers. "Here, eat this! You'll like it!"
Most people just don't make the mental connection that they could click on a link -- something they do pretty often and usually without incident -- and cause serious harm to their computer.
I vote that it's more ignorance (to a certain degree self-imposed, because a lot of people could understand a lot more about their computers if they wanted to, but simply choose not to) than a lack of ability or mental capacity.
Well this is true, it could just as easily be spread via email or something, but the relation to AIM is that once the virus (trojan, whatever you want to call it) gets into your system, I believe that it sends out messages to all of your contacts with the link, propagating itself.
At least this is how several other IM viruses have been spread. I noticed that just this weekend I got several IMs from people that I haven't talked to in years (but who apparently still have me on their lists) which were nothing but links to.COM or.EXE files.
And I didn't get the other URL that was going around. I downloaded the file and opened it up in a hex editor just out of curiosity (I'm on a Mac so it wasn't possible to execute anyway), but there didn't seem to be any obvious text strings or anything.
What I wonder is how the file got up on that web site to begin with; it seems rather farfetched to believe that a virus could find out that someone has a Earthlink web page and upload itself, then send out that link, which makes me think that the person spreading the virus probably planted it there after somehow gaining access to the account, and then letting the version of the virus which points to that URL out. When the linked file is removed the virus stops propagating, but by then has already spread and nabbed a few unwary users. Unless the program has the capability of 'phoning home' to get the URL of the latest location to send out to everyone, that is. The file was a few hundred KB, so I suppose it's entirely possible that it has that capability; you could fit quite a bit of code into something like that.
Not really my area of expertise, but perhaps someone who knows something more can elaborate on how these things work?
Yeah I agree. The first 50 or so "but they didn't include a case!" posts were informative, now they're just redundant.
As for the OS issue, I think it could be easily argued that Tom's Hardware is... well, a HARDWARE guide, and thus they were concerned only with laying out the hardware you'd need to run games, not the OS or other software. I didn't expect them to actually build a $500 gaming rig and include a retail box edition of XP, did anyone else? Of course not; it's assumed that you'll acquire one yourself. The fact that it may include some variety of extralegal means is left unspoken.
I had hoped that this article would actually result in some interesting discussion of low-budget / high-performance hardware and the implied tradeoffs there, but instead it's just attracted a lot of pedants boosting their karma by pointing out that there's no Windows license included for the 100th time.
Ugh, no. No wonder you're pulling your hair out. You don't want to use fink and you really don't want to compile it yourself, unless you have a serious streak of masochism. (In which case drive on, by all means.)
What you want is i-Installer, sometimes referred to as II2 (i-Installer 2). It's a very nice GUI package manager but with a more limited scope than Fink. It's designed so that anyone could use it to distribute software, but the only thing I've ever actually seen it used for is TeX.
Basically once you get it running and point it to which mirror you'd like to use, you get a list of possible packages to install, choose them, and sit back while it does its thing. (Hope you're on a fast connection.)
I've used it for probably half a dozen OS X TeX installs now, and it's always done a great job. The only thing I'd suggest on top of that is TeX Shop, which is a GUI editor and frontend -- although there's no reason why you can't use Emacs and the commandline if you wanted to. I like TeX Shop because it produces PDFs by default and also integrates well with BibDesk, another GUI program for managing bibliographies.
Inasmuch as I haven't really used LaTeX under Linux yet, I do agree that the support seems quite good under OS X. I used TeTeX to write papers all the time and thought it was great, especially since by default it sets itself up to produce PDF files, which IMO are far more useful than DVIs.
In TeX Shop (the editor I use), You type your code in one window (with automatic colorizing / code formatting), hit a button, and look at the results in the PDF window. If you like what you see, you hit Print. I can't imagine LaTeX being any easier than that.
There is even a very slick program called i-Installer which handles the installation of all the LaTeX and TeTeX components and packages, so it's nearly impossible to break during install. (It also does ConTeXt and MusixTeX.) No screwing around with compilers, makefiles, or fink necessary. It will do updates after the install, too, or if you want to add additional options that you didn't initially select -- basically it's a package manager but just for a specific subset of packages.
BibDesk is a great program also. I used it as a sort of 'poor man's End Note' but in some ways I think it is probably superior because it's so infinitely configurable and customizable. I never had a problem formatting my bibliographies into some obscure publication requirement, and the config files were plain text and easy to dig into and tweak to my liking.
Anyway, I wouldn't short LaTeX's support on Mac OS X. It's definitely very solid; why it doesn't get used more in the sciences is beyond me, I think it has to do with the lingering anti-Mac bias in general, but it provides a much more positive experience for the beginning LaTeX user than some of the Windows installs I've seen.
There's another thing at work, too. I'm not sure where speaker.gov is hosted out of, but if it's like any other government IT projects I've seen, the hardware is probably not set up to deal with a big crapflood or DDoS. It would probably just roll over and die, or some overprotective network admin would take it offline to stop the source of the attack / bandwidth waste. Plus, I've no doubt that a high percentage of the posts would probably be offensive and/or blatantly obscene, and it would take a practically-full-time staffer just to filter them out or mod them down.
In general, it would be a whole lot of resources for very little (perceived) gain for him.
Thanks for that link, there's some pretty cool stuff on there.
I went to the uspto.gov site and looked up a few of them (in particular "rocess of preventing visual access to a semiconductor device by applying an opaque ceramic coating to integrated circuit devices," No. 5,258,334) and the assignee is listed as "The U.S. Government as represented by the Director, National Security."
I wonder if this means that the patented idea is essentially public domain? Other creative works which are products of the Government are automatically public domain in terms of copyright, so is the right to use an idea as well? Or if you want to use one, do you have to go to the NSD and ask for permission / licensing? And if the latter, what do they charge, and who gets the money?
I suspect, judging just by the problems and obvious conflicts-of-interest that you'd get if licensing was required, that they are free to use, in which case having the NSA patent something is much like having one of the Linux associations trademark something; they're never going to actually profit from it, but it potentially prevents someone else from doing so unfairly. And I suspect it also looks really good on the NSA's researchers' resumes and improves morale.
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
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OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree, with some qualifications.
Excel is a pretty solid program. What I don't like is how some people use it. Because Excel has some database-like features built in, it leads people to attempt to use it as if it were (and in place of) a real desktop database, leading to really ugly, bloated spreadsheets and finicky cross-sheet references that break at the drop of a hat and are a major pain to track down.
I work regularly with a gigantic spreadsheet like this which is used as an internal financial planning and forecasting tool. The reason I've heard for originally using Excel is that they wanted something that would make graphs. Beginning from that premise, they piled all the data into a spreadsheet, and added sheet after sheet of subtotals forms, reports by week and month, reports by person, etc. It's truly hideous. In order to add a new person, you have to (by hand) modify each of the sheets, update the subtotal lines, etc., while in a real database program this would be relatively simple, if it even required any additional effort at all.
Excel is a great spreadsheet program for doing spreadsheets. What it's NOT is a desktop database, and far too many people are laboring under the impression that it is.
If Microsoft would quit loading all the query and PivotTable type features into Excel and concentrate on being a better spreadsheet than it is already, I wouldn't have any complaints. Even so, I suppose I grudgingly have to say that Excel is probably the least-offensive MS program out there.
This actually isn't a bad suggestion, and it's one I'd never seriously considered. But it makes a certain amount of sense.
Hydrogen is really an energy storage and transportation medium. It's a way of getting energy from a power plant to where you want the work to be done (or close to it). The advantage, as I understand it, comes from the economy of scale at the power plant.
Suppose just for the sake of argument that you have a car that runs on petroleum and a power plant that also uses petroleum. Putting aside that the car's petroleum requires a lot more refining (gasoline or diesel as opposed to bunker oil or diesel) than the power plant's fuel, the power plant is probably going to be a lot more efficient at converting the stored chemical energy in the fuel to a usable form (electricity). I'm pretty sure that an average car is under 20% (allegedly the Prius is 37%), with a theoretical maximum to the Otto Cycle of around 53% (reference). Today's properly designed power plants can greatly exceed that, and can be over 50% if they use a combined cycle, which combines the Brayton cycle of a direct-combustion turbine with a Rankine cycle steam-boiler (theoretical efficiency >80%).
So obviously there is an advantage towards centralizing the fossil-fuel combustion, in the interests of efficiency. The big question is whether you can distribute that power in a way that preserves the efficiency gain. One way is just to string power lines; this doesn't really help the automobile situation (because electric storage batteries are heavy, etc.) though. One option is 'home generation' of hydrogen which you then load into your car, but this involves a number of transitions in which energy is lost. The power plant, the transmission lines, the hydrogen generator, the fuel cell, the electric motors. If anyone has efficiency numbers for those and wants to add them up, I'd be interested: I suspect the net is pretty dismal.
Producing the hydrogen right near the power plant and then physically transporting it seems to be a popular idea right now, although I'm not sure the numbers are going to pan out. Assuming your power plant has an efficiency of 50%, and the hydrogen production has an expended/produced ratio of 2:1, your net efficiency is 25% -- already lower than the "well to wheel" efficiency of a gasoline-powered hybrid car. And that's before you even get into the energy investment into transportation and distribution costs, etc. It seems entirely possible that a hydrogen-distribution infrastructure could end up being less efficient than one where the hydrocarbons are burned directly by the end users, especially if the energy density is lower (so that the per-unit-energy transportation costs are higher). Let's not forget also that in our current situation, the liquid-petroleum distribution network is essentially a 'sunk cost,' already there for us to use. Anything that requires us to change this has to offer enough gain to offset the expenditure involved.
Hydrogen is certainly a neat idea, but I think we risk getting ourselves into a bad situation in the future if we don't consider all the alternatives, including some form of synthesized hydrocarbon energy-carrier which could use the existing distribution network and only be converted to electricity (or directly to heat) at the point of usage. While the devices themselves might seem less "green," the larger system that they are part of might be more efficient, and thus a better option in the long run as we search for more sustainable sources of energy.
I take it you've never seen a lithium fire, have you?
Once you've seen a lithium cell burn, having a few ounces of methanol on your lap seems like a sane and reasonable idea.
Actually given the number of people who carry around compressed-butane canisters in their pockets already (cigarette lighters) I don't think you'd really have a hard time selling the public on fuel-cell laptops.
Exactly. This seems like somebody is trying to figure out a way to do something in-house which really ought to be left to either an outside contractor, or at least set up as a turnkey solution by a consultant. Given that he knows little enough about it that he's asking for help on Slashdot, I think this is yet another problem best solved using the telephone and a fat checkbook, and enough negotiating skills to convince management to pony up the cash up front instead of piddling it out over time on an in-house solution that's going to be a hole into which money and time are poured.
I know people get tired of hearing "call IBM" as a solution to these questions, but in general if you have some massive IT infrastructure development task and are so lost on it that you're asking the/. crowd for help, calling in professionals to take over for you isn't probably a bad idea.
It's not even a question if whether you could do it in-house or not; given enough resources you probably could. It comes down to why you want to do something like this yourselves instead of finding people who do it all the time, week after week, for a living, telling them what you want, getting a price quote, and getting it done. Sure seems like a better way to go to me.
I agree with you, and wanted to see if your suggestions could be boiled down into some real-world suggestions:
1) Buy a recent motherboard, so that it can be upgraded later 2) Buy an older processor 3) Wait a year or two 4) Buy whatever processor was state-of-the-art back at step 1.
In theory you're at least guaranteed to be able to get one processor upgrade cycle out of a setup like that, since the mobo is newer than the original processor, you can (once the latest and greatest processors at the time you got the mobo are old and cheap) get a new processor and thus a speed boost.
Is this roughly correct? Or how would you translate your previous comment into actual buying advice for someone building a system that they wanted to be useful for a few years?
Just a note to what you said (which in general I think was excellent): the tanks used for storing propane are very much unlike the tanks you'd need to store hydrogen.
Propane liquefies at a very low pressure / high temperature, and can be stored in fairly thin-walled, lightweight steel tanks. And even if they do rupture, the pressure released isn't that immense. To get the same volumetric energy density with hydrogen, you'd need to either have the hydrogen at an extremely low temperature (around -273 degrees C) or in a very strong tank at a much higher pressure. Rupturing it would be significantly less pleasant than a similar volume propane tank.
As compressed gasses go, propane is one of the easiest to work with and store as a liquid (I think butane is easier, but that's about it) or at high pressure. Just because we can run cars easily and economically on propane or even natural gas doesn't mean that we've come very close to solving the storage problems associated with compressed-hydrogen automotive fuels.
I disagree, I think it's method of storing photos is logical.
It looks into the metadata to recover the date when a photo was actually taken, and then sorts them into folders by year, month, and day taken. The "film rolls" level of organization (which is really an arbitrary scheme) is done in the program itself, along with the Albums and other types of sorts.
The advantage of this to me is if you have more than one digital camera. Say for instance I went on vacation and took a DSLR and a point-and-shoot, and took photos with both throughout the trip. When I got back and plug them in to download, iPhoto does the logical thing and sorts the photos by date taken on the backend, so all the photos from that period in time are together. It makes it trivial to copy all those photos out of the library later if I wanted to.
iPhoto definitely does have its limitations and weak features, especially on the editing and processing side, but I think the storage and organization features are some of its strongest. Hopefully Aperture will retain those while adding some more advanced editing and processing abilities.
Could be the bit depth of the files you're working with. I don't know what the GIMP is capable of, but most filters in Photoshop only work in 8-bit color mode. This may not be true in the latest version (CS) but it's definitely true in PS7. If you open a 16-bit image, for example from a good film scanner, then a lot of options will be disabled for no apparent reason, until you drop down to 8-bit mode.
I've been led to believe that PS CS fixes some of this and adds expanded 16-bit color support, but I haven't been able to really experiment with it so far.
But if you're working with 8-bit images and the Filters menu is still disabled, then something is wrong with your installation of Photoshop. I can tell you that applying a filter is not a challenging task, and while there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of PS, that is not one of them. Something is wrong on your end, or there's some sort of undisclosed special case at work here.
IMO the biggest critism of PS is its cost. Even with educational pricing it's still $300, not an insignificant chunk of change for most amateur and even some semi-pro photographers. And if you don't qualify for the educational pricing they want an MSRP of $600, which as far as I'm concerned means that it ought to walk, talk, and carry your tripod around for you.
The best alternative to Photoshop that I've used -- and to be fair it's really not an alternative as much as a different tool -- is Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter for OS X. It's cheap ($30!), it's fast, it opens every graphic format I've ever heard of and a lot I haven't (190 of them, from MacPaint to Adobe RAW), and it has a quick edit mode for resizing, cropping, rotating and correcting folders of files. Also, it does batch processing. Hard to beat that with a stick.
Off of the top of my head, I can't think of any situations where the Mac gives you a confirmation dialog when you're trying to complete a reversible action.
Usually when you get a confirmation dialog like that, it's because you're about to do something destructive that's not undoable. For example, emptying the trash. Although I haven't actually read the UI guidelines (and based on some of their recent brushed-metal products, nobody at Apple may have either) it seems like that would be a fairly logical rule for when one should be invoked. If it's a mouse-actuated event that results in the non-undoable loss of data, show a conf dialog. If it's on the CLI, don't bother -- since it's a lot harder to type a command by mistake than it is to mis-click.
I agree that there should be options for advanced users to suppress such dialogs in the GUI (especially for people used to the more terse UNIX CLI philosophy), but I wouldn't want to get rid of them on my mother's machine. Or even necessarily on mine, although I consider myself a relatively intelligent user.
It's nice to know that if you're about to hose a bunch of your data, especially with just a click or two, that you'll get one last chance before you commit to the action.
I don't think this is particularly fair or true. iPhoto isn't plugged into the.Mac service for anything but printing and web page uploads, and the second is only a default: I, for instance (as well as somebody further up in the thread) use Flickr through a very well-designed plugin. Select an album, hit "Export," choose the group and other settings, and away you go.
I agree with you that it isn't exactly obvious how to perform some tasks that ought to be simple, but there's nothing in the core abilities of iPhoto -- storing, sorting, and editing digital photos -- that requires.Mac. It's only if you want to upload them to Apple's web space that you need an account, and it's only if you want one-click printing or book-making that you need to use their printing services.
Using iPhoto without.Mac or the built-in printing services is no more complicated than any other application, where you'd have to just save the photos as files and upload or send them to be printed manually. I've never used the built-in photo printing (although it's not a terribly bad deal cost-wise) because I'm impatient and prefer just to put them on a thumb drive and take them down to Sam's Club to be printed on a Frontier.
IMO the only thing iPhoto is missing is color profiling and color space conversion. If I could just have the ability to choose a different color profile when I went to Export (for the Fuji Frontier, for example), I'd probably never have to launch Photoshop.
That's admittedly cool, but I can't help but wonder how much search traffic stuff like that creates to Wikipedia. Does it run a separate query to the website for every word in your chat?
I don't have any chat transcripts right now to be able to go through and count up what my average number of words per minute or words per hour is, but I bet it's pretty high. Multiply that times the number of users of a product and you've just created a lot of people trying to access Wikipedia all the time. Actually, it starts to look suspiciously like a DDoS attack.
I hope that the software is doing something more intelligent, like querying a local database of words which have WP articles, but if not than it would only take one 'killer app' with a feature like that built in to really do in the Wiki servers. As if they're not slow enough already.
Since the Wikipedia complains about search engines eating up their bandwith, maybe we should just link to the cached page from one of the major search engines
I didn't realize that the Wikipedia people were complaining about that (not that I really pay that much attention) but if it's true then it wouldn't be hard to use one of the search engine caches or the more specific Slashdot caches, or even Coral. People just tend not to use them in the article bodies for whatever reason (I think it's because deep down, they want to melt somebody's webserver).
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. When I saw them talking about the "mammoth" 80MB download, I thought for a moment that maybe they had left off a zero, and really meant its 800MB download size. 80MB wouldn't be much fun to suck down over a 56k dialup, but it's certainly not that bad. I used to get much larger files than that over a modem, by just letting them go overnight.
OO.org needs work, there's no doubt about it, but I think it would be a little sad to see time and money poured into reducing the size of the code on-disk when it could be used to make the program faster or the hardware requirements less strict.
I'm sure there are probably a handful of people around browsing the internet over a 9600 baud dialup connection, for whom an 80MB download is a deal-breaker (and who are mysteriously unable to ask a friend to download and burn it to a CD for them). But seriously, there have to be higher priorities than addressing that issue, especially since OO.org's competition -- MS Office -- can't be downloaded legally at all.
Your differentiation between "micro-evolution" and "macro-evolution" is artificial, and to admit it is basically to surrender the argument in favor of intelligent design peremptorily. What you are calling 'macro-evolution' can easily be described as the sum of many 'micro-evolution' events, taken over time; there is nothing to suggest that they are in any ways different processes.
However, this argument is a red herring to begin with, because whether evolution or Intelligent Design is falsifiable isn't the issue: the problem is that Intelligent Design doesn't offer an explanation for the origin of life. All it does is provide an explanation for human (and other Earthly) life, by attributing its origins, or at least evolutionary progress, to some outside agent. By not explaining the origin of this outside agent as well, it presents a chicken-and-egg problem. If some sort of 'intelligence' was required in order to 'design' the mammalian eye, than certainly this superior intelligence could not have arisen through evolution, as it must certainly be more complex even than we are; therefore it must have been designed by a yet superior intelligence, and so on and so forth.
This circularity problem is only solved -- rather conveniently in my mind, given the proponents of Intelligent Design: mostly Christians -- by a "god hypothesis," the invocation of some sort of ultimate, superior being for which there is no other evidence besides I.D. theory itself. Of course the I.D. theory which is currently being pushed stops just short of this declaration, but it is rather self-evident to any bright student, once you start going down the creationist path.
Intelligent Design isn't a bad theory because of falsifibility, it's a bad theory because it involves the creation of an outside agent to explain processes for which there are simpler, non-externally-dependent explanations, and then does nothing to explain the outside agent which it invokes. In general, where other theories have an internally and logically consistent process, Intelligent Design simply draws a question mark, shrugs, and with a wink and a nudge, points to the Bible.
Do you think it's worth filing a bug report if the rootkit crashes WINE? Or would that be a feature request?
Now, the question is whether people who get infected learn their lesson...that's what I'd like to see.
I doubt it. Most really clueless people will never know that their PC has been rooted, they'll just eventually notice that it's slower than crap (because it's saturating their 1Mb/s cable modem line with packets as part of a DDoS attack) and when it finally becomes unbearable, call GeekSquad or take it down to CompUSA to have it reformatted.
Then they'll start using it again, eventually become re-infected, wait until the computer becomes unusably slow or unstable, get it reformatted again.
I know more people than I'd like to admit who go through this cycle, usually about once every six months or so. A lot of people just figure that totally hosing your hard drive and doing an OS reinstall from system CDs or a protected recovery partition is necessary "maintenance," like changing the oil in a car. You use a computer for a while, the workings get all clogged up inside, and need to be cleaned out...so you drain out the dirty data, replace the OS with a fresh copy, and copy in new fresh data from backups.
Actually it's more like the old adage about taking candy from strangers. "Here, eat this! You'll like it!"
Most people just don't make the mental connection that they could click on a link -- something they do pretty often and usually without incident -- and cause serious harm to their computer.
I vote that it's more ignorance (to a certain degree self-imposed, because a lot of people could understand a lot more about their computers if they wanted to, but simply choose not to) than a lack of ability or mental capacity.
Well this is true, it could just as easily be spread via email or something, but the relation to AIM is that once the virus (trojan, whatever you want to call it) gets into your system, I believe that it sends out messages to all of your contacts with the link, propagating itself.
.COM or .EXE files.
0 80.exe (It has since been removed -- the link is dead)
At least this is how several other IM viruses have been spread. I noticed that just this weekend I got several IMs from people that I haven't talked to in years (but who apparently still have me on their lists) which were nothing but links to
One of them was being hosted at this address:
http://home.earthlink.net/~two4tea/mc-110-12-0000
And I didn't get the other URL that was going around. I downloaded the file and opened it up in a hex editor just out of curiosity (I'm on a Mac so it wasn't possible to execute anyway), but there didn't seem to be any obvious text strings or anything.
What I wonder is how the file got up on that web site to begin with; it seems rather farfetched to believe that a virus could find out that someone has a Earthlink web page and upload itself, then send out that link, which makes me think that the person spreading the virus probably planted it there after somehow gaining access to the account, and then letting the version of the virus which points to that URL out. When the linked file is removed the virus stops propagating, but by then has already spread and nabbed a few unwary users. Unless the program has the capability of 'phoning home' to get the URL of the latest location to send out to everyone, that is. The file was a few hundred KB, so I suppose it's entirely possible that it has that capability; you could fit quite a bit of code into something like that.
Not really my area of expertise, but perhaps someone who knows something more can elaborate on how these things work?
Yeah I agree. The first 50 or so "but they didn't include a case!" posts were informative, now they're just redundant.
... well, a HARDWARE guide, and thus they were concerned only with laying out the hardware you'd need to run games, not the OS or other software. I didn't expect them to actually build a $500 gaming rig and include a retail box edition of XP, did anyone else? Of course not; it's assumed that you'll acquire one yourself. The fact that it may include some variety of extralegal means is left unspoken.
As for the OS issue, I think it could be easily argued that Tom's Hardware is
I had hoped that this article would actually result in some interesting discussion of low-budget / high-performance hardware and the implied tradeoffs there, but instead it's just attracted a lot of pedants boosting their karma by pointing out that there's no Windows license included for the 100th time.
Ugh, no. No wonder you're pulling your hair out. You don't want to use fink and you really don't want to compile it yourself, unless you have a serious streak of masochism. (In which case drive on, by all means.)
t ml
What you want is i-Installer, sometimes referred to as II2 (i-Installer 2). It's a very nice GUI package manager but with a more limited scope than Fink. It's designed so that anyone could use it to distribute software, but the only thing I've ever actually seen it used for is TeX.
You download II2 and read its (fairly simple) instructions here:
http://ii2.sourceforge.net/
Personally I recommend following this procedure:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/installing.h
Basically once you get it running and point it to which mirror you'd like to use, you get a list of possible packages to install, choose them, and sit back while it does its thing. (Hope you're on a fast connection.)
I've used it for probably half a dozen OS X TeX installs now, and it's always done a great job. The only thing I'd suggest on top of that is TeX Shop, which is a GUI editor and frontend -- although there's no reason why you can't use Emacs and the commandline if you wanted to. I like TeX Shop because it produces PDFs by default and also integrates well with BibDesk, another GUI program for managing bibliographies.
Inasmuch as I haven't really used LaTeX under Linux yet, I do agree that the support seems quite good under OS X. I used TeTeX to write papers all the time and thought it was great, especially since by default it sets itself up to produce PDF files, which IMO are far more useful than DVIs.
In TeX Shop (the editor I use), You type your code in one window (with automatic colorizing / code formatting), hit a button, and look at the results in the PDF window. If you like what you see, you hit Print. I can't imagine LaTeX being any easier than that.
There is even a very slick program called i-Installer which handles the installation of all the LaTeX and TeTeX components and packages, so it's nearly impossible to break during install. (It also does ConTeXt and MusixTeX.) No screwing around with compilers, makefiles, or fink necessary. It will do updates after the install, too, or if you want to add additional options that you didn't initially select -- basically it's a package manager but just for a specific subset of packages.
BibDesk is a great program also. I used it as a sort of 'poor man's End Note' but in some ways I think it is probably superior because it's so infinitely configurable and customizable. I never had a problem formatting my bibliographies into some obscure publication requirement, and the config files were plain text and easy to dig into and tweak to my liking.
Anyway, I wouldn't short LaTeX's support on Mac OS X. It's definitely very solid; why it doesn't get used more in the sciences is beyond me, I think it has to do with the lingering anti-Mac bias in general, but it provides a much more positive experience for the beginning LaTeX user than some of the Windows installs I've seen.
There's another thing at work, too. I'm not sure where speaker.gov is hosted out of, but if it's like any other government IT projects I've seen, the hardware is probably not set up to deal with a big crapflood or DDoS. It would probably just roll over and die, or some overprotective network admin would take it offline to stop the source of the attack / bandwidth waste. Plus, I've no doubt that a high percentage of the posts would probably be offensive and/or blatantly obscene, and it would take a practically-full-time staffer just to filter them out or mod them down.
In general, it would be a whole lot of resources for very little (perceived) gain for him.
Thanks for that link, there's some pretty cool stuff on there.
I went to the uspto.gov site and looked up a few of them (in particular "rocess of preventing visual access to a semiconductor device by applying an opaque ceramic coating to integrated circuit devices," No. 5,258,334) and the assignee is listed as "The U.S. Government as represented by the Director, National Security."
I wonder if this means that the patented idea is essentially public domain? Other creative works which are products of the Government are automatically public domain in terms of copyright, so is the right to use an idea as well? Or if you want to use one, do you have to go to the NSD and ask for permission / licensing? And if the latter, what do they charge, and who gets the money?
I suspect, judging just by the problems and obvious conflicts-of-interest that you'd get if licensing was required, that they are free to use, in which case having the NSA patent something is much like having one of the Linux associations trademark something; they're never going to actually profit from it, but it potentially prevents someone else from doing so unfairly. And I suspect it also looks really good on the NSA's researchers' resumes and improves morale.
I agree, with some qualifications.
Excel is a pretty solid program. What I don't like is how some people use it. Because Excel has some database-like features built in, it leads people to attempt to use it as if it were (and in place of) a real desktop database, leading to really ugly, bloated spreadsheets and finicky cross-sheet references that break at the drop of a hat and are a major pain to track down.
I work regularly with a gigantic spreadsheet like this which is used as an internal financial planning and forecasting tool. The reason I've heard for originally using Excel is that they wanted something that would make graphs. Beginning from that premise, they piled all the data into a spreadsheet, and added sheet after sheet of subtotals forms, reports by week and month, reports by person, etc. It's truly hideous. In order to add a new person, you have to (by hand) modify each of the sheets, update the subtotal lines, etc., while in a real database program this would be relatively simple, if it even required any additional effort at all.
Excel is a great spreadsheet program for doing spreadsheets. What it's NOT is a desktop database, and far too many people are laboring under the impression that it is.
If Microsoft would quit loading all the query and PivotTable type features into Excel and concentrate on being a better spreadsheet than it is already, I wouldn't have any complaints. Even so, I suppose I grudgingly have to say that Excel is probably the least-offensive MS program out there.
This actually isn't a bad suggestion, and it's one I'd never seriously considered. But it makes a certain amount of sense.
Hydrogen is really an energy storage and transportation medium. It's a way of getting energy from a power plant to where you want the work to be done (or close to it). The advantage, as I understand it, comes from the economy of scale at the power plant.
Suppose just for the sake of argument that you have a car that runs on petroleum and a power plant that also uses petroleum. Putting aside that the car's petroleum requires a lot more refining (gasoline or diesel as opposed to bunker oil or diesel) than the power plant's fuel, the power plant is probably going to be a lot more efficient at converting the stored chemical energy in the fuel to a usable form (electricity). I'm pretty sure that an average car is under 20% (allegedly the Prius is 37%), with a theoretical maximum to the Otto Cycle of around 53% (reference). Today's properly designed power plants can greatly exceed that, and can be over 50% if they use a combined cycle, which combines the Brayton cycle of a direct-combustion turbine with a Rankine cycle steam-boiler (theoretical efficiency >80%).
So obviously there is an advantage towards centralizing the fossil-fuel combustion, in the interests of efficiency. The big question is whether you can distribute that power in a way that preserves the efficiency gain. One way is just to string power lines; this doesn't really help the automobile situation (because electric storage batteries are heavy, etc.) though. One option is 'home generation' of hydrogen which you then load into your car, but this involves a number of transitions in which energy is lost. The power plant, the transmission lines, the hydrogen generator, the fuel cell, the electric motors. If anyone has efficiency numbers for those and wants to add them up, I'd be interested: I suspect the net is pretty dismal.
Producing the hydrogen right near the power plant and then physically transporting it seems to be a popular idea right now, although I'm not sure the numbers are going to pan out. Assuming your power plant has an efficiency of 50%, and the hydrogen production has an expended/produced ratio of 2:1, your net efficiency is 25% -- already lower than the "well to wheel" efficiency of a gasoline-powered hybrid car. And that's before you even get into the energy investment into transportation and distribution costs, etc. It seems entirely possible that a hydrogen-distribution infrastructure could end up being less efficient than one where the hydrocarbons are burned directly by the end users, especially if the energy density is lower (so that the per-unit-energy transportation costs are higher). Let's not forget also that in our current situation, the liquid-petroleum distribution network is essentially a 'sunk cost,' already there for us to use. Anything that requires us to change this has to offer enough gain to offset the expenditure involved.
Hydrogen is certainly a neat idea, but I think we risk getting ourselves into a bad situation in the future if we don't consider all the alternatives, including some form of synthesized hydrocarbon energy-carrier which could use the existing distribution network and only be converted to electricity (or directly to heat) at the point of usage. While the devices themselves might seem less "green," the larger system that they are part of might be more efficient, and thus a better option in the long run as we search for more sustainable sources of energy.
I take it you've never seen a lithium fire, have you?
Once you've seen a lithium cell burn, having a few ounces of methanol on your lap seems like a sane and reasonable idea.
Actually given the number of people who carry around compressed-butane canisters in their pockets already (cigarette lighters) I don't think you'd really have a hard time selling the public on fuel-cell laptops.
Exactly. This seems like somebody is trying to figure out a way to do something in-house which really ought to be left to either an outside contractor, or at least set up as a turnkey solution by a consultant. Given that he knows little enough about it that he's asking for help on Slashdot, I think this is yet another problem best solved using the telephone and a fat checkbook, and enough negotiating skills to convince management to pony up the cash up front instead of piddling it out over time on an in-house solution that's going to be a hole into which money and time are poured.
/. crowd for help, calling in professionals to take over for you isn't probably a bad idea.
I know people get tired of hearing "call IBM" as a solution to these questions, but in general if you have some massive IT infrastructure development task and are so lost on it that you're asking the
It's not even a question if whether you could do it in-house or not; given enough resources you probably could. It comes down to why you want to do something like this yourselves instead of finding people who do it all the time, week after week, for a living, telling them what you want, getting a price quote, and getting it done. Sure seems like a better way to go to me.
I agree with you, and wanted to see if your suggestions could be boiled down into some real-world suggestions:
1) Buy a recent motherboard, so that it can be upgraded later
2) Buy an older processor
3) Wait a year or two
4) Buy whatever processor was state-of-the-art back at step 1.
In theory you're at least guaranteed to be able to get one processor upgrade cycle out of a setup like that, since the mobo is newer than the original processor, you can (once the latest and greatest processors at the time you got the mobo are old and cheap) get a new processor and thus a speed boost.
Is this roughly correct? Or how would you translate your previous comment into actual buying advice for someone building a system that they wanted to be useful for a few years?
Just a note to what you said (which in general I think was excellent): the tanks used for storing propane are very much unlike the tanks you'd need to store hydrogen.
Propane liquefies at a very low pressure / high temperature, and can be stored in fairly thin-walled, lightweight steel tanks. And even if they do rupture, the pressure released isn't that immense. To get the same volumetric energy density with hydrogen, you'd need to either have the hydrogen at an extremely low temperature (around -273 degrees C) or in a very strong tank at a much higher pressure. Rupturing it would be significantly less pleasant than a similar volume propane tank.
As compressed gasses go, propane is one of the easiest to work with and store as a liquid (I think butane is easier, but that's about it) or at high pressure. Just because we can run cars easily and economically on propane or even natural gas doesn't mean that we've come very close to solving the storage problems associated with compressed-hydrogen automotive fuels.
it's just an overpriced, inefficient spaceheater
It's funny, I feel the same way about a lot of coworkers.
I disagree, I think it's method of storing photos is logical.
It looks into the metadata to recover the date when a photo was actually taken, and then sorts them into folders by year, month, and day taken. The "film rolls" level of organization (which is really an arbitrary scheme) is done in the program itself, along with the Albums and other types of sorts.
The advantage of this to me is if you have more than one digital camera. Say for instance I went on vacation and took a DSLR and a point-and-shoot, and took photos with both throughout the trip. When I got back and plug them in to download, iPhoto does the logical thing and sorts the photos by date taken on the backend, so all the photos from that period in time are together. It makes it trivial to copy all those photos out of the library later if I wanted to.
iPhoto definitely does have its limitations and weak features, especially on the editing and processing side, but I think the storage and organization features are some of its strongest. Hopefully Aperture will retain those while adding some more advanced editing and processing abilities.
Could be the bit depth of the files you're working with. I don't know what the GIMP is capable of, but most filters in Photoshop only work in 8-bit color mode. This may not be true in the latest version (CS) but it's definitely true in PS7. If you open a 16-bit image, for example from a good film scanner, then a lot of options will be disabled for no apparent reason, until you drop down to 8-bit mode.
I've been led to believe that PS CS fixes some of this and adds expanded 16-bit color support, but I haven't been able to really experiment with it so far.
But if you're working with 8-bit images and the Filters menu is still disabled, then something is wrong with your installation of Photoshop. I can tell you that applying a filter is not a challenging task, and while there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of PS, that is not one of them. Something is wrong on your end, or there's some sort of undisclosed special case at work here.
IMO the biggest critism of PS is its cost. Even with educational pricing it's still $300, not an insignificant chunk of change for most amateur and even some semi-pro photographers. And if you don't qualify for the educational pricing they want an MSRP of $600, which as far as I'm concerned means that it ought to walk, talk, and carry your tripod around for you.
The best alternative to Photoshop that I've used -- and to be fair it's really not an alternative as much as a different tool -- is Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter for OS X. It's cheap ($30!), it's fast, it opens every graphic format I've ever heard of and a lot I haven't (190 of them, from MacPaint to Adobe RAW), and it has a quick edit mode for resizing, cropping, rotating and correcting folders of files. Also, it does batch processing. Hard to beat that with a stick.
Off of the top of my head, I can't think of any situations where the Mac gives you a confirmation dialog when you're trying to complete a reversible action.
Usually when you get a confirmation dialog like that, it's because you're about to do something destructive that's not undoable. For example, emptying the trash. Although I haven't actually read the UI guidelines (and based on some of their recent brushed-metal products, nobody at Apple may have either) it seems like that would be a fairly logical rule for when one should be invoked. If it's a mouse-actuated event that results in the non-undoable loss of data, show a conf dialog. If it's on the CLI, don't bother -- since it's a lot harder to type a command by mistake than it is to mis-click.
I agree that there should be options for advanced users to suppress such dialogs in the GUI (especially for people used to the more terse UNIX CLI philosophy), but I wouldn't want to get rid of them on my mother's machine. Or even necessarily on mine, although I consider myself a relatively intelligent user.
It's nice to know that if you're about to hose a bunch of your data, especially with just a click or two, that you'll get one last chance before you commit to the action.
I don't think this is particularly fair or true. iPhoto isn't plugged into the .Mac service for anything but printing and web page uploads, and the second is only a default: I, for instance (as well as somebody further up in the thread) use Flickr through a very well-designed plugin. Select an album, hit "Export," choose the group and other settings, and away you go.
.Mac. It's only if you want to upload them to Apple's web space that you need an account, and it's only if you want one-click printing or book-making that you need to use their printing services.
.Mac or the built-in printing services is no more complicated than any other application, where you'd have to just save the photos as files and upload or send them to be printed manually. I've never used the built-in photo printing (although it's not a terribly bad deal cost-wise) because I'm impatient and prefer just to put them on a thumb drive and take them down to Sam's Club to be printed on a Frontier.
I agree with you that it isn't exactly obvious how to perform some tasks that ought to be simple, but there's nothing in the core abilities of iPhoto -- storing, sorting, and editing digital photos -- that requires
Using iPhoto without
IMO the only thing iPhoto is missing is color profiling and color space conversion. If I could just have the ability to choose a different color profile when I went to Export (for the Fuji Frontier, for example), I'd probably never have to launch Photoshop.
That's admittedly cool, but I can't help but wonder how much search traffic stuff like that creates to Wikipedia. Does it run a separate query to the website for every word in your chat?
I don't have any chat transcripts right now to be able to go through and count up what my average number of words per minute or words per hour is, but I bet it's pretty high. Multiply that times the number of users of a product and you've just created a lot of people trying to access Wikipedia all the time. Actually, it starts to look suspiciously like a DDoS attack.
I hope that the software is doing something more intelligent, like querying a local database of words which have WP articles, but if not than it would only take one 'killer app' with a feature like that built in to really do in the Wiki servers. As if they're not slow enough already.
I didn't realize that the Wikipedia people were complaining about that (not that I really pay that much attention) but if it's true then it wouldn't be hard to use one of the search engine caches or the more specific Slashdot caches, or even Coral. People just tend not to use them in the article bodies for whatever reason (I think it's because deep down, they want to melt somebody's webserver).