His work on monkeys, which started over 20 years ago, culminated in the full head transplants. The animals survived for more than a week with no impairment of mental faculties before they were put down,for humane reasons.
Well, enough, but I'm not a medical scientist. Can someone explain how one evaluates the mental acuity of a paralyzed monkey???
Also, apparently it's inhumane to allow a monkey to live like this, but it's great for people!
One of the problems I'm seeing is the impression that Open Source is more about crushing windows than it is about sharing ideas and technology that cost us nothing to share.
Remember that as a community, we Open Source folks get our strength from building off each other's strengths, and sharing our own for what I hope is some kind of greater good. Part of that greater good, I hope, is alleviating the need for developers to reinvent the wheel, as there are so many things that developers need in common, that we can benefit from sharing and improving common tools and libraries. The other part of that greater good is to help people like myself, when I was younger and more naive, and scraped together enough money to buy a computer only to find I could not afford the software to do anything useful. Open Source, and at that time shareware, was the only way I could claw my way out of ignorance and learn how to program to harness the power of my machine.
That has nothing to do with Microsoft, and I know that restricting Open Source technology from the Windows platform certainly does not strengthen any Open Source ideals. It is not going to make anyone ``switch'' away from the Bad Way. In fact, it can only serve to do the opposite, to paint the picture of the Open Source movement as a bunch of elitist and closed(!) minded individuals, who are willing to share only if you agree with their ideals! How is that going to help people join the cause?
On the other hand, let's imagine that someone that has never experienced the Open Source Way, using his/her Evil Operating System, discovers a ray of hope in some small library, or some other project. Suppose he/she benefits from it, or submits a change and discovers what Open Source is really all about? Then won't that have been part of the greater good?
Open Source is about creating, not about destroying, whether it be closed-source development, or Microsoft. Make sure that people realize that, and that we're not just a bunch of petty Linux and BSD bigots.
I wish you weren't anonymous so I could respond directly, but oh well. I hope you read this.:)
The output of/dev/random is 8 bits. (0-255) When you take the mod 95, you get results like this:
/dev/random =>/dev/random % 95 ------------------------------- 0-94 => 0-94 95-189 => 0-94 190-255 => 0-64 Aag... HTML is no good for aligning things... without <TABLE>s!!!!
This is very bad. Note that the rage from 0-64 is represented 50% more than 65-94! This will seriously distrupt the randomness of your data. In fact, I'm quite surprised your SD was only 0.1, though I didn't do the math myself. At any rate, the correct way to produce values from 0 to 94 from/dev/random would be to %128 (or &127) to cleanly extract 7 bits, and discard values above 94. Then your output would hold up in the histogram.
If you do try this, please let me know at the above email address. I hope I can restore your faith in/dev/random, as it actually is quite good.
You're right. As long as the sound can be played on today's technology, there's no way in hell they're going to work around this... erm.... oversight. Not to mention, if your soundcard has digital output, you can just dump the thing to DAT, or into another machine.
The only way to block copying of music is to make a special DSP in a sound card that does the decryption, and the algorithm coded into hardware can't be that advanced or this thing will be very expensive and no one would ever want it.
Even given that, there's nothing ever possible that will prevent an analog copy, and I know from experience that if you have the right setup, with a good s/n ratio, you'd never notice the difference between that and a digital copy.
BTW How have things been going for you guys since the IGF? (This is Chuck, from VV.)
When I first began using X, I found it to be ugly and difficult to use. As it turns out, I had unfairly prejudged it, because they were the applications that were ugly and difficult to use.
When you say folks think that X is outdated and should be replaced, that doesn't really say anything about what's wrong with it. Yes, X is very old, in computing terms, but I think its longevity has proven something about its incredible capability. Not to mention, nice projects like GNOME and KDE have definitely alleviated the ``ugly and difficult to use'' situation.
Despite any problems I've ever had with X, all that goes away when I start a remote KDE session on my Windows box using the MicroImages X server. The whole remote display thing is pure genius as far as I'm concerned. And using Xnest to get a session on another box is just rockin'. I don't even know about another windowing system that can do anything like this. If there is, I'd like to see it.
Some years ago, I would have been clamoring for Borland tools on Linux, because I really disliked the GNU tools. After a couple years' time, though, I've come to realize why the GNU tools are better. Sorry, Borland...
I saw this thing at Comdex '97. This was after already thinking that the guys at Immersion were total crackheads. Although that's because I always thought, and still do, that force feedback is one of the dumbest uses of technology there has ever been. (Of course that didn't prevent me from incorporating force feedback into my project. It's another one of those buzzword features that game buyers like.)
Needless to say, I thought force feedback joysticks were the dumbest thing in the world... until I saw this! Yet you should have seen the line at the Immersion booth of people waiting to get their hands on this thing. They were showing a demo of how much more ``efficient'' you can be when your mouse can snap to buttons and feel around the edges of windows. I thought to myself, ``What a load of hooey.''
They had a demo there, where you had to click on a bunch of randomly positioned buttons in numerical order. You could try it with the force off, and the force on. I'm sure it was rigged to ``suck'' the mouse into the correct button, but either way the demo proved that people were faster with the force, and the people were impressed. Here I am showing off games on one side of the floor, and only the force feedback mouse elicits the response, ``Wow. That's amazing!''
Not that I'm bitter...;) Two years later I've heard nothing of Immersion or the force feedback mouse until this. Now, instead of making me more efficient, it will allow me to feel things on the web. Now let me tell you, there are a lot of things (especially banner ads) on the web that I just don't want to feel. But I suppose, if the device went nowhere since I saw it, if they somehow attach the word ``web'' to it, sales will skyrocket.
Just wondering Jon, did you really mean Johnny Depp, or Johnny Deep? I ask because neither 21 Jump Street nor Ed Wood puts me in the mind of "The Complete Geek."
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer Crimson Fedora.
-Chuck
Well, enough, but I'm not a medical scientist. Can someone explain how one evaluates the mental acuity of a paralyzed monkey???
Also, apparently it's inhumane to allow a monkey to live like this, but it's great for people!
Remember that as a community, we Open Source folks get our strength from building off each other's strengths, and sharing our own for what I hope is some kind of greater good. Part of that greater good, I hope, is alleviating the need for developers to reinvent the wheel, as there are so many things that developers need in common, that we can benefit from sharing and improving common tools and libraries. The other part of that greater good is to help people like myself, when I was younger and more naive, and scraped together enough money to buy a computer only to find I could not afford the software to do anything useful. Open Source, and at that time shareware, was the only way I could claw my way out of ignorance and learn how to program to harness the power of my machine.
That has nothing to do with Microsoft, and I know that restricting Open Source technology from the Windows platform certainly does not strengthen any Open Source ideals. It is not going to make anyone ``switch'' away from the Bad Way. In fact, it can only serve to do the opposite, to paint the picture of the Open Source movement as a bunch of elitist and closed(!) minded individuals, who are willing to share only if you agree with their ideals! How is that going to help people join the cause?
On the other hand, let's imagine that someone that has never experienced the Open Source Way, using his/her Evil Operating System, discovers a ray of hope in some small library, or some other project. Suppose he/she benefits from it, or submits a change and discovers what Open Source is really all about? Then won't that have been part of the greater good?
Open Source is about creating, not about destroying, whether it be closed-source development, or Microsoft. Make sure that people realize that, and that we're not just a bunch of petty Linux and BSD bigots.
That would be the 007 factor.
Oh, and BTW, you shouldn't use goto. It's bad style.
The output of /dev/random is 8 bits. (0-255) When you take the mod 95, you get results like this:
-------------------------------
0-94 => 0-94
95-189 => 0-94
190-255 => 0-64
Aag... HTML is no good for aligning things... without <TABLE>s!!!!
This is very bad. Note that the rage from 0-64 is represented 50% more than 65-94! This will seriously distrupt the randomness of your data. In fact, I'm quite surprised your SD was only 0.1, though I didn't do the math myself. At any rate, the correct way to produce values from 0 to 94 from /dev/random would be to %128 (or &127) to cleanly extract 7 bits, and discard values above 94. Then your output would hold up in the histogram.
If you do try this, please let me know at the above email address. I hope I can restore your faith in /dev/random, as it actually is quite good.
The only way to block copying of music is to make a special DSP in a sound card that does the decryption, and the algorithm coded into hardware can't be that advanced or this thing will be very expensive and no one would ever want it.
Even given that, there's nothing ever possible that will prevent an analog copy, and I know from experience that if you have the right setup, with a good s/n ratio, you'd never notice the difference between that and a digital copy.
BTW How have things been going for you guys since the IGF? (This is Chuck, from VV.)
When you say folks think that X is outdated and should be replaced, that doesn't really say anything about what's wrong with it. Yes, X is very old, in computing terms, but I think its longevity has proven something about its incredible capability. Not to mention, nice projects like GNOME and KDE have definitely alleviated the ``ugly and difficult to use'' situation.
Despite any problems I've ever had with X, all that goes away when I start a remote KDE session on my Windows box using the MicroImages X server. The whole remote display thing is pure genius as far as I'm concerned. And using Xnest to get a session on another box is just rockin'. I don't even know about another windowing system that can do anything like this. If there is, I'd like to see it.
Some years ago, I would have been clamoring for Borland tools on Linux, because I really disliked the GNU tools. After a couple years' time, though, I've come to realize why the GNU tools are better. Sorry, Borland...
Needless to say, I thought force feedback joysticks were the dumbest thing in the world... until I saw this! Yet you should have seen the line at the Immersion booth of people waiting to get their hands on this thing. They were showing a demo of how much more ``efficient'' you can be when your mouse can snap to buttons and feel around the edges of windows. I thought to myself, ``What a load of hooey.''
They had a demo there, where you had to click on a bunch of randomly positioned buttons in numerical order. You could try it with the force off, and the force on. I'm sure it was rigged to ``suck'' the mouse into the correct button, but either way the demo proved that people were faster with the force, and the people were impressed. Here I am showing off games on one side of the floor, and only the force feedback mouse elicits the response, ``Wow. That's amazing!''
Not that I'm bitter... ;) Two years later I've heard nothing of Immersion or the force feedback mouse until this. Now, instead of making me more efficient, it will allow me to feel things on the web. Now let me tell you, there are a lot of things (especially banner ads) on the web that I just don't want to feel. But I suppose, if the device went nowhere since I saw it, if they somehow attach the word ``web'' to it, sales will skyrocket.
I still don't think it can do corduroy.
The only example I can think of is the GNU Privacy Guard. It's homepage and repository are based in Germany to avoid US crypto export restrictions.
At the very least, it will all be developed in Europe (as it seems to be in large part, anyway) and still, the whole world will have it.
Eventually, they'll just have to face it: This is one way they won't be able to invade anyone's privacy.
-Chuck
Anyone else think it's funny that Microsoft created the problem, and the solution?
You guys scared me for a moment...
I just can't say the phrase "Ass-kicking machine" without laughing out loud!
Gnu/Linux is correct. It is the proper title for the Linux kernel and the GNU tools that make up a usuable operating system.
Imagine what Mom thinks when she hears her kid saying something like:
``I can't wait to get my hands on Boobies! Just a couple more weeks. And I'm also looking forward to V.D., which should be right around the corner.''
Check ``this'' out. I don't know what it looks like on your screen, but on mine (Netscape 4.05 on Linux) it looks pretty ``nice.''
In that case, check this out. Jon was talking about trying to go down the geek road, and it reminded me of this. That's why I was confused.
Just wondering Jon, did you really mean Johnny Depp, or Johnny Deep? I ask because neither 21 Jump Street nor Ed Wood puts me in the mind of "The Complete Geek."