From the TFA, it is clear that Microsoft approves of this particular move. I quote
It's recently surfaced that it has a serious security vulnerability, and Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on.
I mean, this damage control. But I think Firefox is doing the mature thing and doing it the right way. Because not everbody wants to read the MS KnowledgeBase article and implement it themselves. At least, not my mom.
Having parked under a tree during a hailstorm, how is this different from something as solid as hail raining down on you?
Ice is pretty solid and it's created by pretty much the same phenomenon as the pebbles in this planet.
All you need is a temperature range between solid to gas of a substance and a rotation speed slow enough to cool the other side by radiation.
But I'm not going to shout down any scientist who's spent enough time to measure the spectra, do the math about temperatures and conclude this... because science is good.
So, rock ON!:)
Autotune the News #8 was the best mix
on
Carl Sagan Sings
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Yo, I'm happy for Autotune #1 and all, but I'ma let you finish... the Autotune the News #8 was the best news mix of all time.
Especially the lip-sync video editing was just too good. It had me singing along to Michael Vick... that's gotta count for something:)
I tried this particular piece of code out and it works! Of course, the ping buffer and the IP swap is just so obviously simple... WOW!
The "everything is a file" unix philosophy really does kick in and pull its weight in this example. Sockets, network devices, hardware block devices... You can write an app to do pretty much anything with any of these, with just file streams. Oh, yeah... dd'ing entire flash drives, netcating sockets, rsync'ing root partitions over. I often am completely amazed by the complexity that simple pieces can produce.
Now everyone - stop talking bad about twitter... it's awesome, it's simple and it's given random people the idea that I'm interesting & intelligent;)
I already have a national ID card which lets me vote, I have a PAN number which tracks literally every economic transaction of significance I make. They know everything about my vehicles and my travel arrangements.
Now, they're going to pay someone to build a system which correlates all this into some useless information. It'll take six years to build & cost tons of money for the government, half of which will end up being passed under the table as kickbacks and the rest with the contractors. Eventually, the system will be built and works fairly decently, but has no information about anyone who does not really volunteer it first-hand.
It'll be done, but completely useless. Some people will become rich and... as the general attitude will be "I want less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it". A complete waste of tax payer's money, but not quite the invasion of my privacy that most people imagine.
But hell yeah, I'm going to protest. Even their incompetence can't be depended up on:)
The essential problem with free software is that most of it is written to scratch someone's itch. Usually, the ones who start off coding to fix their problems are the developers. Over the last decade that I've used linux (and other f/oss) on my desktop, I've seen a radical shift in how the developers are influenced to do what a user wants. More so, I've seen the system favour the ones who have user focus rather than dictate from their ivory towers and yell back "sure, send me a patch & we'll talk about it". You did your bit and the others stepped on those to get where they want... and with GPL in place they didn't really step on your toes.
Essentially, you didn't owe the user anything for real. The user paid in attention & respect. The developer did what the user wanted as long as he (or she) wanted the respect. Over that, it was just about fun when it was Y2K days.
It'd be vastly different if someone paid me for it. Well, yes... someone does pay me to churn out F/OSS code, I deal with vastly differently from my other projects.
The fundamental issue with the new RIA standards is the lack the of authoring tools. I have got a number of graphically-inclined friends who are never going to write something with HTML5 mainly because there are no tools out there (yet) which come even close what the Adobe authoring tools can do.
Recently, I sat with one of my friends (who's a decent artist) and played around with Processing 1.0. After several minutes of hard work, it just became
abundantly clear that visual thinkers have a lot of trouble expressing what they want algorithmically. The experience was repeated the next time, when he was playing
around with chucK (yeah, he's a music dude too).
The graphic artist folks will have a lot of trouble using the HTML 5 authoring tools currently available, especially if they're confined to use HTML Canvas programmatically. I've easily gotten upto speed with canvas, but I'm a programmer with no artistic pretensions.
Real adoption of HTML5 - canvas and video & all, will need easy ways to author media... not write code.
For years, the elephants in southern India have been hunted for their tusks. Fifteen years ago, you could very well run into a lone tusker in the wild with metre long tusks.
But now of late, there are baby elephants being born who grow up to be fertile males without the large tusks. With tiny foot long points out of their mouths, instead of something resembling the original giants that I used to love.
It's almost as if the poachers are even more of a significant selection force than nature and female preference put together.
Political satire has always found enough outlets. The web is just the modern equivalent of a guy with a basement mimeograph churning out pictures of politicians with their heads up their parties. And lowering the barrier to entry and the increasing the exposure/audience just adds up in a way that the baby boomers aren't used to (IMHO). Yeah, web is basically a complex with a mansion upfront, a huge backyard & enough fences to slow down the more agile.
On a related note, I keep occasionally hitting Sock & Awe, just for kicks. Ironic that nobody jumped in front of the shoe.
If only there was a way to make money off slashdot dupes!.
I mean, it's like a perpetual motion machine or something. Almost as if the editors themselves don't read the articles. AT ALL.
Yeah, echo the same comments. Let me echo mine, the guy's done an insanely good job with the font thickness to create the queen out of near ASCII art. Respect.
I don't know about you, but sitting here in India, I kinda get the feeling that there's more dirty work afoot.
When I look at the current gas shortage in the US or the economic crunch/bailouts, I sort of get the feeling that it's all coming together to one point - an absolute sense of insecurity for the middle class. The kind of people who'd do anything to keep their way of life - and in enough numbers to tip over the balance for the ruling class. Abortion and gay marriages are just not really the issues which decide the fate of a country (Roe vs Wade though), but they're easy issues to divide these people with. Tax cuts and bailouts are the real deal, but at this point there seem to be no fiscal conservative in power in the us (to quote myself - "in this economy of bad cheques, the only winner is a spender").
That kind of subliminal fear in the society. If that's not a dirty trick, what is?
PS: and today was the day someone from my office was implicated in a terror bombing case... and the office is still calm & un-paranoid (*wow*)
Considering Fullerine is C-60 and therefore weighs 720p (ha! protons) and hydrogen atoms weigh exactly 2, this means that they can hold ~30 hydrogen atoms in it?
Oddly, I think the issue would be balancing the containment energy of the buckyball versus the energy burning the hydrogen released. There *might* be a sweet spot in the number of hydrogen stable inside versus the tickle required to make the ball release them, for this to make sense.
I think the public nature of the bid suggests that private behind-closed doors negotiations have failed and they're trying to attempt a near-hostile takeover. YHOO shares have jumped about 10 USD over friday and a lot of us have been getting rid of them. And I wonder who's buying all of these, in reality? Someone who'd pay 31 dollars for a share, when they could instead buy it in-market at 28?
I'd really hope it was some sort of last-ditch effort to put shareholder pressure onto Jerry Yang (yes, I do work at Y! and I do have a very nice job, which I'd be really sad to leave...). And yeah, read my domain to figure out exactly why I would have to:)
Here's to hoping that it doesn't happen (for YUI, flickr, freebsd, hadoop and del.icio.us!)
The magic 8-ball can in fact predict the future. To do that reverse the polarity of the universe (CPT symmetries apply), entangle the entropies of the required universe with the 8-ball and remember to shake the ball outside the universe to avoid recursion.
Seriously, anyone who's read Experts Speak or paleo-future blog will probably be rather critical of such predictions. But like the Dune book says, prescience does modify the future like a fish through water.
So, being hopeful about the future, but wary about it at the same time is the most productive approach to predictions. Check plus on that for this effort.
Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF.
Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).
> [9] What is your positioning with respect to the issue of OOXML?
An exasperating waste of time -- on both sides of the debate -- that will ultimately harm international technology standards more than it will ever help Microsoft's bottom line or harm the absolutely inevitable success of Software Freedom.
I've already shouted down MooXML, but
I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does
the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).
As much as the No DRM makes sense from a political & ethical point of view, the fact that people are recognizing DRM as a bad thing is starting to dawn on people. When Apple iTunes wanted DRM out of the way (for audio, though not for video), I thought of it as a win-win-win situation for everyone including the artists, APPL and the users (screw the RIAA).
Now Y! is doing the same thing and very intelligent of them too. Yahoo! music engine is not something I would use (or *could* use) despite getting a promotional offer (*disclaimer* as an employee) and tying down people to such idiotic client lockins (*cough* jukebox) is not working out well for it at all. If it would work well with Amarok or even the less popular Songbird, I'd happily use it over Last.fm (which streams directly into amarok happily).
Finally, it is a good thing that Y! is realizing that Convenience is a Feature++ - one way or the other.
Look at the original Ximian. I mean, writing Evolution was the core USP of whatever Ximian became into. But somewhere on the way into building an open source email client/PIM/Outlook-killer, the Evolution codebase filled up with what I can only call "employee code" (i.e This fixes the bug now, we'll see what it breaks in QA).
I've tried hacking around there, but eventually ended up back in thunderbird land. But on that side of the fence, some of the problems are purely due to over-engineered modularity (yes... yes, we all love XPCOM [*cough* bonobo], but not that much). And considering I've weaned most of my relatives off Outlook Express with thunderbird, migrating them to Kmail was kinda too hard to have a point.
In short, "do it well" with hackers and don't just hack it up with code written by employees to meet deadlines. Because I sure as hell would love a email client that I could sic my sister/cousins on (she runs linux now, without any clue beyond "clicky clicky") and hack on when I get a brilliant idea once in a while (for example, a pluggable addressbook api - ala kmail's hooks)
But I do have to wonder, does this violate the DMCA? (not that I care much, being in India). Now if they actually reverse engineer the whole daap:// protocol, I'd be more interested, having more friends who run iTunes (in office) than those who don't - being able to share music was one of the really cool things I used to enjoy with them.
But looks like Steve Jobs wanting no DRM for audio was not really for us, but to get the antitrust monopoly stuff off his back *for* iTunes, not really to sell to songs to Joe Usb-Player-User.
Anyway, if you picked Apple - you've picked Apple all the way. There are no half-ways about it and according to a few of my friends - it's seamless and worth the price you pay (I don't agree, but...).
As much as I'm appalled by the legal incongruencies involved, the deal seems to be rather fair towards the contributors (except that they didn't get $$$ - but did they ever expect money in return for CC-NC content?)
I mean, Jimbo Wales is no idiot about Wikis (and seemed very down to earth guy when I met him). As much as this might be legal wrangling in the hands of the original owner, if I were a contributor I wouldn't be calling my lawyers. The ideal solution would be for the Wikia folks to ask for CC-SA (striking the NC) relicensing from all authors - in a classic King Solomon solution, by putting up a static data dump on torrents & offering to take down content of any contributor who objects from the wiki version.
But not the lawyers... don't turn this place into a land of "lawyers and order".
I have no idea what this guy does or what his individual talents are (thank you, nytimes), but this seems somewhat reprehensible hobby to pursue ?
I mean, it's not that I'm not guilty of the I'm with those guys syndrome, but I've felt guilty for having gone out of my way to get a picture with Tanenbaum or Linus.
I've often wondered why I did it and can only put it down as "Celebrity by Association". And made a mental note to be in the same frame as these people by effort & hard work rather than by mere geographical coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
From the TFA, it is clear that Microsoft approves of this particular move. I quote
It's recently surfaced that it has a serious security vulnerability, and Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on.
I mean, this damage control. But I think Firefox is doing the mature thing and doing it the right way. Because not everbody wants to read the MS KnowledgeBase article and implement it themselves. At least, not my mom.
Having parked under a tree during a hailstorm, how is this different from something as solid as hail raining down on you?
Ice is pretty solid and it's created by pretty much the same phenomenon as the pebbles in this planet. All you need is a temperature range between solid to gas of a substance and a rotation speed slow enough to cool the other side by radiation.
But I'm not going to shout down any scientist who's spent enough time to measure the spectra, do the math about temperatures and conclude this ... because science is good.
So, rock ON! :)
Yo, I'm happy for Autotune #1 and all, but I'ma let you finish... the Autotune the News #8 was the best news mix of all time.
Especially the lip-sync video editing was just too good. It had me singing along to Michael Vick ... that's gotta count for something :)
I tried this particular piece of code out and it works! Of course, the ping buffer and the IP swap is just so obviously simple ... WOW!
The "everything is a file" unix philosophy really does kick in and pull its weight in this example. Sockets, network devices, hardware block devices ... You can write an app to do pretty much anything with any of these, with just file streams. Oh, yeah ... dd'ing entire flash drives, netcating sockets, rsync'ing root partitions over. I often am completely amazed by the complexity that simple pieces can produce.
Now everyone - stop talking bad about twitter ... it's awesome, it's simple and it's given random people the idea that I'm interesting & intelligent ;)
Needn't be all big cats.
For instance, I've always been fascinated by the Serval for some strange reason...
There's the Caracal, Ocelot and Lynx ... then Cougars, if you are into that kind of thing.
I think I know how this will work out.
I already have a national ID card which lets me vote, I have a PAN number which tracks literally every economic transaction of significance I make. They know everything about my vehicles and my travel arrangements.
Now, they're going to pay someone to build a system which correlates all this into some useless information. It'll take six years to build & cost tons of money for the government, half of which will end up being passed under the table as kickbacks and the rest with the contractors. Eventually, the system will be built and works fairly decently, but has no information about anyone who does not really volunteer it first-hand.
It'll be done, but completely useless. Some people will become rich and ... as the general attitude will be "I want less corruption or more opportunity to participate in it". A complete waste of tax payer's money, but not quite the invasion of my privacy that most people imagine.
But hell yeah, I'm going to protest. Even their incompetence can't be depended up on :)
The essential problem with free software is that most of it is written to scratch someone's itch. Usually, the ones who start off coding to fix their problems are the developers. Over the last decade that I've used linux (and other f/oss) on my desktop, I've seen a radical shift in how the developers are influenced to do what a user wants. More so, I've seen the system favour the ones who have user focus rather than dictate from their ivory towers and yell back "sure, send me a patch & we'll talk about it". You did your bit and the others stepped on those to get where they want ... and with GPL in place they didn't really step on your toes.
Essentially, you didn't owe the user anything for real. The user paid in attention & respect. The developer did what the user wanted as long as he (or she) wanted the respect. Over that, it was just about fun when it was Y2K days.
It'd be vastly different if someone paid me for it. Well, yes ... someone does pay me to churn out F/OSS code, I deal with vastly differently from my other projects.
The fundamental issue with the new RIA standards is the lack the of authoring tools. I have got a number of graphically-inclined friends who are never going to write something with HTML5 mainly because there are no tools out there (yet) which come even close what the Adobe authoring tools can do.
Recently, I sat with one of my friends (who's a decent artist) and played around with Processing 1.0. After several minutes of hard work, it just became abundantly clear that visual thinkers have a lot of trouble expressing what they want algorithmically. The experience was repeated the next time, when he was playing around with chucK (yeah, he's a music dude too).
The graphic artist folks will have a lot of trouble using the HTML 5 authoring tools currently available, especially if they're confined to use HTML Canvas programmatically. I've easily gotten upto speed with canvas, but I'm a programmer with no artistic pretensions.
Real adoption of HTML5 - canvas and video & all, will need easy ways to author media ... not write code.
For years, the elephants in southern India have been hunted for their tusks. Fifteen years ago, you could very well run into a lone tusker in the wild with metre long tusks.
But now of late, there are baby elephants being born who grow up to be fertile males without the large tusks. With tiny foot long points out of their mouths, instead of something resembling the original giants that I used to love.
It's almost as if the poachers are even more of a significant selection force than nature and female preference put together.
Political satire has always found enough outlets. The web is just the modern equivalent of a guy with a basement mimeograph churning out pictures of politicians with their heads up their parties. And lowering the barrier to entry and the increasing the exposure/audience just adds up in a way that the baby boomers aren't used to (IMHO). Yeah, web is basically a complex with a mansion upfront, a huge backyard & enough fences to slow down the more agile.
On a related note, I keep occasionally hitting Sock & Awe, just for kicks. Ironic that nobody jumped in front of the shoe.
If only there was a way to make money off slashdot dupes!.
I mean, it's like a perpetual motion machine or something. Almost as if the editors themselves don't read the articles. AT ALL.
Yeah, echo the same comments. Let me echo mine, the guy's done an insanely good job with the font thickness to create the queen out of near ASCII art. Respect.
I don't know about you, but sitting here in India, I kinda get the feeling that there's more dirty work afoot.
When I look at the current gas shortage in the US or the economic crunch/bailouts, I sort of get the feeling that it's all coming together to one point - an absolute sense of insecurity for the middle class. The kind of people who'd do anything to keep their way of life - and in enough numbers to tip over the balance for the ruling class. Abortion and gay marriages are just not really the issues which decide the fate of a country (Roe vs Wade though), but they're easy issues to divide these people with. Tax cuts and bailouts are the real deal, but at this point there seem to be no fiscal conservative in power in the us (to quote myself - "in this economy of bad cheques, the only winner is a spender").
That kind of subliminal fear in the society. If that's not a dirty trick, what is?
PS: and today was the day someone from my office was implicated in a terror bombing case ... and the office is still calm & un-paranoid (*wow*)
I didn't see no slashdot article when yahoo put up hosted YUI packages served off their CDN.
I guess it's because google is hosting non-google libraries?
Considering Fullerine is C-60 and therefore weighs 720p (ha! protons) and hydrogen atoms weigh exactly 2, this means that they can hold ~30 hydrogen atoms in it?
Oddly, I think the issue would be balancing the containment energy of the buckyball versus the energy burning the hydrogen released. There *might* be a sweet spot in the number of hydrogen stable inside versus the tickle required to make the ball release them, for this to make sense.
"Some" people are way ahead of the curve on being an internet of its own, but not only the telco wired land.
After all, the network is the computer ... BHWAHAHA ! ;)
Just for the record, I'm on vacation and out of office (well, I'm on the wrong side of the equator from office).
:)
So, my comment is completely uninformed, baseless speculation (wishful perhaps too).
PS: thanks to the dude who pinged me and told me to shut up
I think the public nature of the bid suggests that private behind-closed doors negotiations have failed and they're trying to attempt a near-hostile takeover. YHOO shares have jumped about 10 USD over friday and a lot of us have been getting rid of them. And I wonder who's buying all of these, in reality? Someone who'd pay 31 dollars for a share, when they could instead buy it in-market at 28?
I'd really hope it was some sort of last-ditch effort to put shareholder pressure onto Jerry Yang (yes, I do work at Y! and I do have a very nice job, which I'd be really sad to leave ...). And yeah, read my domain to figure out exactly why I would have to :)
Here's to hoping that it doesn't happen (for YUI, flickr, freebsd, hadoop and del.icio.us!)
The magic 8-ball can in fact predict the future. To do that reverse the polarity of the universe (CPT symmetries apply), entangle the entropies of the required universe with the 8-ball and remember to shake the ball outside the universe to avoid recursion.
Seriously, anyone who's read Experts Speak or paleo-future blog will probably be rather critical of such predictions. But like the Dune book says, prescience does modify the future like a fish through water.
So, being hopeful about the future, but wary about it at the same time is the most productive approach to predictions. Check plus on that for this effort.
Not that my opinion matters, but I think a lot of really talented people are wasting their time getting pulled between OOXML and ODF. Right from Jody Goldberg and a lot of others are spending a lot of time supporting both (and debating why).
And looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that - quoted from Jdub's email to gnome-lists.
I've already shouted down MooXML, but I think I'm done talking about this, if I'm not going to do anything in particular (say, does the Koffice ODF guys need some help?).
As much as the No DRM makes sense from a political & ethical point of view, the fact that people are recognizing DRM as a bad thing is starting to dawn on people. When Apple iTunes wanted DRM out of the way (for audio, though not for video), I thought of it as a win-win-win situation for everyone including the artists, APPL and the users (screw the RIAA).
Now Y! is doing the same thing and very intelligent of them too. Yahoo! music engine is not something I would use (or *could* use) despite getting a promotional offer (*disclaimer* as an employee) and tying down people to such idiotic client lockins (*cough* jukebox) is not working out well for it at all. If it would work well with Amarok or even the less popular Songbird, I'd happily use it over Last.fm (which streams directly into amarok happily).
Finally, it is a good thing that Y! is realizing that Convenience is a Feature++ - one way or the other.
Look at the original Ximian. I mean, writing Evolution was the core USP of whatever Ximian became into. But somewhere on the way into building an open source email client/PIM/Outlook-killer, the Evolution codebase filled up with what I can only call "employee code" (i.e This fixes the bug now, we'll see what it breaks in QA).
I've tried hacking around there, but eventually ended up back in thunderbird land. But on that side of the fence, some of the problems are purely due to over-engineered modularity (yes ... yes, we all love XPCOM [*cough* bonobo], but not that much). And considering I've weaned most of my relatives off Outlook Express with thunderbird, migrating them to Kmail was kinda too hard to have a point.
In short, "do it well" with hackers and don't just hack it up with code written by employees to meet deadlines. Because I sure as hell would love a email client that I could sic my sister/cousins on (she runs linux now, without any clue beyond "clicky clicky") and hack on when I get a brilliant idea once in a while (for example, a pluggable addressbook api - ala kmail's hooks)
I guess someone's been vindicated.
But I do have to wonder, does this violate the DMCA? (not that I care much, being in India). Now if they actually reverse engineer the whole daap:// protocol, I'd be more interested, having more friends who run iTunes (in office) than those who don't - being able to share music was one of the really cool things I used to enjoy with them. But looks like Steve Jobs wanting no DRM for audio was not really for us, but to get the antitrust monopoly stuff off his back *for* iTunes, not really to sell to songs to Joe Usb-Player-User.
Anyway, if you picked Apple - you've picked Apple all the way. There are no half-ways about it and according to a few of my friends - it's seamless and worth the price you pay (I don't agree, but ...).
As much as I'm appalled by the legal incongruencies involved, the deal seems to be rather fair towards the contributors (except that they didn't get $$$ - but did they ever expect money in return for CC-NC content?)
... don't turn this place into a land of "lawyers and order".
I mean, Jimbo Wales is no idiot about Wikis (and seemed very down to earth guy when I met him). As much as this might be legal wrangling in the hands of the original owner, if I were a contributor I wouldn't be calling my lawyers. The ideal solution would be for the Wikia folks to ask for CC-SA (striking the NC) relicensing from all authors - in a classic King Solomon solution, by putting up a static data dump on torrents & offering to take down content of any contributor who objects from the wiki version.
But not the lawyers
The iPhone updates email even when it's off?
Then how is it legal to carry it on airplane or somewhere where it requires to operate in complete radio-off mode?
I have no idea what this guy does or what his individual talents are (thank you, nytimes), but this seems somewhat reprehensible hobby to pursue ?
I mean, it's not that I'm not guilty of the I'm with those guys syndrome, but I've felt guilty for having gone out of my way to get a picture with Tanenbaum or Linus.
I've often wondered why I did it and can only put it down as "Celebrity by Association". And made a mental note to be in the same frame as these people by effort & hard work rather than by mere geographical coincidence.