I think cleverness is center of it. Sure, the atom bomb was ingenious...but they had/researchers/ getting paid to work on it for quite a while. I'm not exactly sure of the history of the Manhattan project, but it would have to be some crucial inspiration of some guy to do some unexpected clever stuff to make it a hack.
The transistor was somewhat of a hack. Bardeen and Brattain, who invented it were just given the assignment by Shockley as rote work to waste their time, so Shockley could invent it for himself. Little did Shockley know that they would actually invent the transistor (or at least create a working one). Again, I'm not sure if this is a "hack", because although two clever guys did it, they/were/ researchers and/were/ being paid to find the solution...it wasn't something unforeseen and unexpected.
Oh, yeah, it was the first Allied/general/ programmable computer. The bombe was a specific application. I believe Collossus's behavior could be modified.
The Collossus was better. It was designed and built by a guy from the post office (name was Flowers I think), who was somehow related to the project because they used speciall runners to carry messages back and forth. Anyway, this guy decides to use vacuum tubes to build a computer. Everybody thought he was crazy, but he actually did it, and IIRC it contained @1500 vacuum tubes, way more than the number of rollers in Turing's bombe (well, not really Turing's). Turing seems to be credited with all this great stuff. Anyay, the Collossus was used to crack the new German modulo2 arithmetic codes. It only took, like 15 minutes to crack a code, instead of DAYS of people working around the clock. Really great, really an ingenious good hack.
Sheesh..I JUST read this on Ars, and some guy posted that they'd submit it to slashdot. Flip my browser window and bing, there it is...second time something like this has happened
good to know Slashdot get the scoop (or 2nd scoop)...
I read the cc hack page...but I don't see what is so great about it. It seemed that since the old compiler didn't yet know what a given escape was, the ascii code was substituted for it. Is that the hack?
The replicating bugs was interesting...but I'm not sure I understood what the point was in showing it was possible to create compilers which introduced bugs. woo
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
·
· Score: 2
Right...not at all like Star Trek. The theme of Star Trek was that all of us, regardless of gender, political, racial, ethnic, etc., boundaries need to work together. We're all in this together. Star Trek is the drama of humanity played out in space. After TNG the Star Trek franchise started sucking rocks...but humanity overcoming through unification was Rodenberry's original theme.
Contrast this to Star Wars which basically says everything is hopeless and the only chance for salvation is through nobility and dictatorship of one form or another. Outcomes are determined by chance, luck, or fate, but not due to any qualities of humanity.
So, what exactly is the difference between 9719 and 9747. It looks like 9747 is the 1.5 version whereas 9719 is the 1.0 version which comes with a free upgrade. Yet 9719 has 727 pieces and 9747 comes with less, 717 pieces...
?
Re:Hey world! George Lucas uses advertising! Get '
on
Dear Mr. Lucas
·
· Score: 2
Except that he has the nasty habit of try to preach to us with his movies.
"Could the end of the would come about as result of some 12-year-old with his new Gateway rather then the more conventional Judeo-Christian four horsemen?"
We all know the end of the world will be because of Y2K. Sheesh...get a clue;)
Maybe that was the point. Also, how do you quantify in monetary numbers the effect of a country losing face and looking really stupid to the whole world. What if the hacker put up something really inciteful, like slurs against other countries?
"If the 40000$ damages were, even if in part, a result of the White House sysadmins updating security, you can't really attribute that to his crime."
Yes you can. Security holes don't exploit themselves and cause $40000 in damages.
"Charging me for the fixing of a security hole I exploited is rediculous. The hole is there whether I broke in or not."
The charge is not for the fixing of the hole, but for reparations of the damages you caused by exploiting it.
In most cases the "damages" are grossly exaggerated, but in this case, the whole country has lost face and looks stupid. Imagine going to england.uk (or whatever...) to learn about England and seeing a defaced site. The whole country looks stupid.
That DOOM admin stuff was cool. It is sort of exciting to me to think that we could be moving to a new paradigm in computing...that a GUI would not be a mere/facade/ to the computer, but that actual actions in the virtual environment translate directly into actions on OS objects. (Plus I watched Matrix twice last weekend)
Part of slashdot is being in tune with the "buzz" of the industry/community, whether or not that "buzz" always turns out to be true. Just as long as slashdotters know to take a rumorous story with a grain of salt, and that articles are being totally fabricated, it's cool.
Could be that the wannabees, propeller heads and terminal junkies of 1990 appropriated the word "geek" and by 1999 when they had come into their own have now mutated it into a positive term.
Remember, the script kiddies of today will be the sysadmins of tomorrow (shudder).
Now items at levels 2 and three can be swapped...i.e., you can choose whatever window manager you want, and under that window manager, applications can use whatever tookit they way, more or less. Now, where do GNOME and KDE come in. They appear to be somewhere between 2 and 3. Are they simply "glue"/abstraction layers? Certainly they're not replacing XFree are they? And what is the meaning, and point, of choosing window managers under KDE or GNOME? Don't KDE and GNOME handle the look and feel? It would seem that if I could choose whatever window manager I wanted, and applications could choose whatever toolkit they wanted, that I'd have a pretty ugly, non-standardized, incompatible mess of a GUI. How does this work?
64MB seems a bit hefty of a minimum, considering that when Linux is concerned a minimum can go down to a 486. I would like to see, perhaps, 8 or 16 MB as a minimum. Doesn't have to be great, but just the minimum above which it will work (to some extent) and below which it will just break or simply not load.
XML is the way to go. It is a lot better suited for describing arbitrary data. It is a lot easier to go from an XML format to any other format, than from one proprietary format to another.
Yuk...for general pointing use a pen would be awefully. The reason your hand gets cramped when you write a lot is because it is not normal to scrunch it up into the awkward position require to hold a pen. The mere awkwardness of having to/hold/ something to point would be annoying. A mouse just sits there...if I want to move it I move it. I don't haven to pick it up and then put it on some surface to make contact. A cylander is just too awkard to use except for activities that require micro-motor skills (writing). A pen is no good for macro-motor activities.
In the drop-down list there was another article about Bill Gates giving 26m to charity. With the other quotes in the article, that comes to 8.5+B to charity. Although MS may not have deserved it in the first place, it sort of makes you wonder where that money from people well-off enough to buy Windows in the first place, would have gone otherwise. Possibly to third world child-labor feuled designer clothing, $5 cups of coffee, fast food, video rental fees, and cheesy poofs...
Slashdot Mirror
I think cleverness is center of it. Sure, the atom bomb was ingenious...but they had /researchers/ getting paid to work on it for quite a while. I'm not exactly sure of the history of the Manhattan project, but it would have to be some crucial inspiration of some guy to do some unexpected clever stuff to make it a hack.
/were/ researchers and /were/ being paid to find the solution...it wasn't something unforeseen and unexpected.
The transistor was somewhat of a hack. Bardeen and Brattain, who invented it were just given the assignment by Shockley as rote work to waste their time, so Shockley could invent it for himself. Little did Shockley know that they would actually invent the transistor (or at least create a working one). Again, I'm not sure if this is a "hack", because although two clever guys did it, they
How about this story about magic? Don't know if it could be called a "hack", but it sure is interesting:
s tory_about_magic.html
http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/hacker_folklore/a_
A page with info on the Collossus, whose development was lead by Dr. Tommy Flowers (not Turing) of the Post Office Research Laboratories in London:
s .html
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u6rs/turing/collossu
It was innovative in that it used vaccuum tubes, read automatically from tape (the first real input device!) and was a bit programmable.
This gets my vote...hope it's moderated up.
Oh, yeah, it was the first Allied /general/ programmable computer. The bombe was a specific application. I believe Collossus's behavior could be modified.
The Collossus was better. It was designed and built by a guy from the post office (name was Flowers I think), who was somehow related to the project because they used speciall runners to carry messages back and forth. Anyway, this guy decides to use vacuum tubes to build a computer. Everybody thought he was crazy, but he actually did it, and IIRC it contained @1500 vacuum tubes, way more than the number of rollers in Turing's bombe (well, not really Turing's). Turing seems to be credited with all this great stuff. Anyay, the Collossus was used to crack the new German modulo2 arithmetic codes. It only took, like 15 minutes to crack a code, instead of DAYS of people working around the clock. Really great, really an ingenious good hack.
Man...when Segfault turned off the write-ins and comments, the loonies started flooding slashdot.
How you accumulated -35 Karma with only 13 posts I can only guess Jizmak.
Sheesh..I JUST read this on Ars, and some guy posted that they'd submit it to slashdot. Flip my browser window and bing, there it is...second time something like this has happened
good to know Slashdot get the scoop (or 2nd scoop)...
I read the cc hack page...but I don't see what is so great about it. It seemed that since the old compiler didn't yet know what a given escape was, the ascii code was substituted for it. Is that the hack?
The replicating bugs was interesting...but I'm not sure I understood what the point was in showing it was possible to create compilers which introduced bugs. woo
Right...not at all like Star Trek. The theme of Star Trek was that all of us, regardless of gender, political, racial, ethnic, etc., boundaries need to work together. We're all in this together. Star Trek is the drama of humanity played out in space. After TNG the Star Trek franchise started sucking rocks...but humanity overcoming through unification was Rodenberry's original theme.
Contrast this to Star Wars which basically says everything is hopeless and the only chance for salvation is through nobility and dictatorship of one form or another. Outcomes are determined by chance, luck, or fate, but not due to any qualities of humanity.
So, what exactly is the difference between 9719 and 9747. It looks like 9747 is the 1.5 version whereas 9719 is the 1.0 version which comes with a free upgrade. Yet 9719 has 727 pieces and 9747 comes with less, 717 pieces...
?
Except that he has the nasty habit of try to preach to us with his movies.
/ 15/brin_main / 15/brin_side
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06
http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwars.html
"Could the end of the would come about as result of some 12-year-old with his new Gateway rather then the more conventional Judeo-Christian four horsemen?"
;)
We all know the end of the world will be because of Y2K. Sheesh...get a clue
"this was enough to discourage me."
Maybe that was the point. Also, how do you quantify in monetary numbers the effect of a country losing face and looking really stupid to the whole world. What if the hacker put up something really inciteful, like slurs against other countries?
"If the 40000$ damages were, even if in part, a result of the White House sysadmins updating security, you can't really attribute that to his crime."
Yes you can. Security holes don't exploit themselves and cause $40000 in damages.
"Charging me for the fixing of a security hole I exploited is rediculous. The hole is there whether I broke in or not."
The charge is not for the fixing of the hole, but for reparations of the damages you caused by exploiting it.
In most cases the "damages" are grossly exaggerated, but in this case, the whole country has lost face and looks stupid. Imagine going to england.uk (or whatever...) to learn about England and seeing a defaced site. The whole country looks stupid.
That DOOM admin stuff was cool. It is sort of exciting to me to think that we could be moving to a new paradigm in computing...that a GUI would not be a mere /facade/ to the computer, but that actual actions in the virtual environment translate directly into actions on OS objects. (Plus I watched Matrix twice last weekend)
Part of slashdot is being in tune with the "buzz" of the industry/community, whether or not that "buzz" always turns out to be true. Just as long as slashdotters know to take a rumorous story with a grain of salt, and that articles are being totally fabricated, it's cool.
Could be that the wannabees, propeller heads and terminal junkies of 1990 appropriated the word "geek" and by 1999 when they had come into their own have now mutated it into a positive term.
Remember, the script kiddies of today will be the sysadmins of tomorrow (shudder).
They appear to be somewhere between 2 and 3.
=
They appear to be somewhere between 1 and 2.
Man, I really can't type today...
Ok, I thought I understood things but some of these questions have confused me. I thought the layers to GUI under *nix was basically:
1) X protocol (gui agnostic)
2) Window manager
3) Toolkit (at application level)
Now items at levels 2 and three can be swapped...i.e., you can choose whatever window manager you want, and under that window manager, applications can use whatever tookit they way, more or less. Now, where do GNOME and KDE come in. They appear to be somewhere between 2 and 3. Are they simply "glue"/abstraction layers? Certainly they're not replacing XFree are they? And what is the meaning, and point, of choosing window managers under KDE or GNOME? Don't KDE and GNOME handle the look and feel? It would seem that if I could choose whatever window manager I wanted, and applications could choose whatever toolkit they wanted, that I'd have a pretty ugly, non-standardized, incompatible mess of a GUI. How does this work?
64MB seems a bit hefty of a minimum, considering that when Linux is concerned a minimum can go down to a 486. I would like to see, perhaps, 8 or 16 MB as a minimum. Doesn't have to be great, but just the minimum above which it will work (to some extent) and below which it will just break or simply not load.
XML is the way to go. It is a lot better suited for describing arbitrary data. It is a lot easier to go from an XML format to any other format, than from one proprietary format to another.
...a pen would be awefully. = ...a pen would be awful.
I don't haven... = I don't have...
A cylander is... = A cylinder is...
Man I need to get more sleep...
Yuk...for general pointing use a pen would be awefully. The reason your hand gets cramped when you write a lot is because it is not normal to scrunch it up into the awkward position require to hold a pen. The mere awkwardness of having to /hold/ something to point would be annoying. A mouse just sits there...if I want to move it I move it. I don't haven to pick it up and then put it on some surface to make contact. A cylander is just too awkard to use except for activities that require micro-motor skills (writing). A pen is no good for macro-motor activities.
In the drop-down list there was another article about Bill Gates giving 26m to charity. With the other quotes in the article, that comes to 8.5+B to charity. Although MS may not have deserved it in the first place, it sort of makes you wonder where that money from people well-off enough to buy Windows in the first place, would have gone otherwise. Possibly to third world child-labor feuled designer clothing, $5 cups of coffee, fast food, video rental fees, and cheesy poofs...
McGyver probably has a good case against him. Where /was/ McGyver /anyway/? He should be saving the world.