"She is currently assessing spoofing vulnerability in fingerprint scanners and designing methods to correct for these as part of a $3.1 million interdisciplinary research project funded through the NSF."
I see a lot of people arguing with sentences like "my (insert favorite OSS messenger has transparent yada-yada feature, beat that MSN, or AOL or whatever) but the average user doesn't even know what it is, albeit how to use it. Most of the FOSS IM apps lack fancyness, the fancyness that the commercial IMs has.
I am currently in China, but my girlfriend is back in Denmark, so I often videochat using msn messenger with her. While we're at it, I often use those fancy animations that comes with messenger, because my girlfriend thinks they're cute (hey, whatever works, right?).
I have more than once tried to install an open source client, but they all seem to lack one or two feature I really miss. If I was more of the developing type, I'd probably start coding right now, but I am not.
Pardon me Sir, but as I am staying in China at the moment I have to correct you on that one, as there is nearly nothing available to the western world that hasn't been made available in China. Now for the launch, I am quite looking forward to it, but I still have problems seeing the point in these kinds of space flights, and I see them as nothing else than expensive bungie jumps for the mere prestige of the statement itself. Now a mission to Mars might have it's use in the sense of mapping the known universe (and discovering that it is not as known as per se)
a manned space mission where the sole objective is a 'little stroll' in the mere vicinity of earth, I see no point at all other than an expensive non-simulated training for the astronauts.
Well, I think this whole case about Apple converting to intel based processors has been blown out of it's proportions. Many people greeted this with an idea that now they could expect to run OSX on their own dell or whatever PC, thinking that Apple would use the chance to redefine itself. But I think that Apple isn't interested in such a game. I am pretty sure that the last thing they want is to redefine themselves. Apple has already found their place in the computer market, as the company that would sell all sorts of professional computers with a fancy design, running this operating system that looked incredibly fancy. I am pretty sure that the only reason that they switched processor type is because the market demanded it, that they simply couldn't continue to use IBM produced processors if they were to cope.
But as this is said, one should not disregard the fact that OSX is built on an open source core, allowing it to be just a matter of time before someone finds out how to emulate the things that are different in the intel-based macs compared to ordinary intel based machines, and then somehow implement it in Darwin, making it possible to run OSX natively.
When I first read about the blog censorship on msn in china, I tried it myself, and discovered that you were infact allowed to write the words "freedom" and "democracy" if you only registered yourself as not living in China. So with my fake identity of a Chinese student living in Beijing, I couldn't write the characters for democracy, but with my real identity of a Danish student living in Copenhagen, I could easily write those words, and it had no impact that I was infact using the Chinese msn site.
I thought I might test the thing, to see if the article is right, and I decided to write about the process here while I do it.
First of all, my chinese isn't very good. I study chinese, but I started last september, so I don't read that many characters...
But first off when trying to create a msn.com space, is the passport account. So I decided to create a chinese hotmail account, with the data of a young student living in Beijing. That was only a little tricky. The two obstacles I ran into was finding the zip code of Beijing, and finding out what I had to do in the text box on the last page next to the email address I just created. The zip code was quickly solved after finding the homepage of European Centre For Chinese Studies at Beijing University, and their address... The text field, I found out after numerous tries, was just a reconfirmation of that same email. Having the email address and passport account created I was sent back to the My Space creation page.
I decided my space should be called 'ziyouheminzhu', being the words 'freedom' 'and' 'democracy'.
Just to check, I entered that in Chinese characters as the name of the blog and clicked continue. A fat red text popped up saying "You cannot use forbidden words!".
So the article is right, but for the sake of maintaining a critical view to journalism, I thought I had to prove it...
Well, if you study it, the only thing communistic about China is the rhetoric. Everything else is actually more or less a continuation of the imperial and bureaucratic traditions put forward during the Qin dynasty 221-206 BC. Also my history teacher had a good point when she wrote the internet on the list of problems that China are facing these days...
I remember in the early 90's, there were these small annoying pda-wannabes. I think some of them were called "Data banks" or something. They were small, and often only included 16KB of memory, a calendar, a calculator and some password protected account-what-so-ever program. Most of these useless paperweights had an alphabetically sorted keyboard, and honestly, that was a pain to type on. To be frank, I was not very old at the time when they were out, so I wasn't used to any layout, neither QWERTY nor DVORAK, but still, my typing speed was greatly reduced with this, and it only caused my annoyance to type with it. So the question stands, why didn't Newstandardkeyboard do their research and conclude that alphabetical is NOT the way to sort the keys on a keyboard. And frankly, I don't think I could find another layout so far away from the words that we type.
And what's with the design? If I had a child, I would give it to him or her with an instruction to throw it out after use:)
I must object. Just because they are elected doesn't mean it's democratic.
For instance, wouldn't it be more democratic if every person running for president was given the same sum of money to do their campaign? I would say so. I know this is a pretty big issue, but my point is only that just because people vote, doesn't make it in any way fair.
By the way your note about greek democracy hits you in your face again;)
Because in ancient greece, only the rich and wealthy were allowed to participate in the democracy, which is kinda what happens in USA too. Only the rich and already powerful people have a chance in the presidential run.
I think what they were supposed to do, was to make a windows xp version without anything bundled, like media player, browser, text editor and so forth. What they actually made was a Windows XP without quality of any kind. How sad. I really don't see how this is going to battle Linux in any way. "Look, you can get a poor operating system for a lot of money and a great operating system for free" What kind of logic is that?
You mean a nested webserver, that only works as long as you keep your browserwindow open? Gee' that's technology!
Furthermore, this must be the most reliable anti-slashdotting technique. The moment you remove the 1.5k limit, I am sure people will start mirroring articles on it:)
If you own one of the more expensive versions of the soundblaster Audigy soundcard, you get a nice remote control. This remotecontrol works in linux with a little program delivered with the driver. It has a basic setup to work with xmms.
First of all, as a citizen of Denmark, I was quite surprised to see this. First of all, it is not long ago a new government was elected. The first thing they did was removing the institude of alternative energy, while the only argument was, that the institude was populated by hippies and leftists (hooray for stalinism, or what?).
So how I see this is: "Heck, we arent in the government in 28 years, so its not our fault if it's not there..."
It might be because that most gurus (and me) have learned linux using commands and tricky shortcuts resulting in running either a screen-like window manager, just text mode or ie. blackbox. This is of course how gurus seem to like it, and also a nice and fast way to run linux in. But if you require that a newbie is to use these ways that in his eyes look primitive and a lot of difficult stuff, he might just give up immediatly. So start teaching them kde or something as easy as that. Learn them kwrite not vi, kvirc not epic4 or bitchx etc etc...
Slashdot Mirror
"She is currently assessing spoofing vulnerability in fingerprint scanners and designing methods to correct for these as part of a $3.1 million interdisciplinary research project funded through the NSF."
I hope she didn't use it all on Play-Doh...
a license to shill
(check this if you don't know what I am talking about)
I see a lot of people arguing with sentences like "my (insert favorite OSS messenger has transparent yada-yada feature, beat that MSN, or AOL or whatever) but the average user doesn't even know what it is, albeit how to use it. Most of the FOSS IM apps lack fancyness, the fancyness that the commercial IMs has. I am currently in China, but my girlfriend is back in Denmark, so I often videochat using msn messenger with her. While we're at it, I often use those fancy animations that comes with messenger, because my girlfriend thinks they're cute (hey, whatever works, right?). I have more than once tried to install an open source client, but they all seem to lack one or two feature I really miss. If I was more of the developing type, I'd probably start coding right now, but I am not.
Pardon me Sir, but as I am staying in China at the moment I have to correct you on that one, as there is nearly nothing available to the western world that hasn't been made available in China. Now for the launch, I am quite looking forward to it, but I still have problems seeing the point in these kinds of space flights, and I see them as nothing else than expensive bungie jumps for the mere prestige of the statement itself. Now a mission to Mars might have it's use in the sense of mapping the known universe (and discovering that it is not as known as per se) a manned space mission where the sole objective is a 'little stroll' in the mere vicinity of earth, I see no point at all other than an expensive non-simulated training for the astronauts.
Well, I think this whole case about Apple converting to intel based processors has been blown out of it's proportions. Many people greeted this with an idea that now they could expect to run OSX on their own dell or whatever PC, thinking that Apple would use the chance to redefine itself. But I think that Apple isn't interested in such a game. I am pretty sure that the last thing they want is to redefine themselves. Apple has already found their place in the computer market, as the company that would sell all sorts of professional computers with a fancy design, running this operating system that looked incredibly fancy. I am pretty sure that the only reason that they switched processor type is because the market demanded it, that they simply couldn't continue to use IBM produced processors if they were to cope. But as this is said, one should not disregard the fact that OSX is built on an open source core, allowing it to be just a matter of time before someone finds out how to emulate the things that are different in the intel-based macs compared to ordinary intel based machines, and then somehow implement it in Darwin, making it possible to run OSX natively.
When I first read about the blog censorship on msn in china, I tried it myself, and discovered that you were infact allowed to write the words "freedom" and "democracy" if you only registered yourself as not living in China. So with my fake identity of a Chinese student living in Beijing, I couldn't write the characters for democracy, but with my real identity of a Danish student living in Copenhagen, I could easily write those words, and it had no impact that I was infact using the Chinese msn site.
I thought I might test the thing, to see if the article is right, and I decided to write about the process here while I do it.
First of all, my chinese isn't very good. I study chinese, but I started last september, so I don't read that many characters...
But first off when trying to create a msn.com space, is the passport account. So I decided to create a chinese hotmail account, with the data of a young student living in Beijing. That was only a little tricky. The two obstacles I ran into was finding the zip code of Beijing, and finding out what I had to do in the text box on the last page next to the email address I just created. The zip code was quickly solved after finding the homepage of European Centre For Chinese Studies at Beijing University, and their address... The text field, I found out after numerous tries, was just a reconfirmation of that same email. Having the email address and passport account created I was sent back to the My Space creation page.
I decided my space should be called 'ziyouheminzhu', being the words 'freedom' 'and' 'democracy'.
Just to check, I entered that in Chinese characters as the name of the blog and clicked continue. A fat red text popped up saying "You cannot use forbidden words!".
So the article is right, but for the sake of maintaining a critical view to journalism, I thought I had to prove it...
Well, if you study it, the only thing communistic about China is the rhetoric. Everything else is actually more or less a continuation of the imperial and bureaucratic traditions put forward during the Qin dynasty 221-206 BC.
Also my history teacher had a good point when she wrote the internet on the list of problems that China are facing these days...
Maybe the intellectual level of the comments would be much higher if slashdot infact allowed more bots to comment?
I remember in the early 90's, there were these small annoying pda-wannabes. I think some of them were called "Data banks" or something. They were small, and often only included 16KB of memory, a calendar, a calculator and some password protected account-what-so-ever program.
:)
Most of these useless paperweights had an alphabetically sorted keyboard, and honestly, that was a pain to type on. To be frank, I was not very old at the time when they were out, so I wasn't used to any layout, neither QWERTY nor DVORAK, but still, my typing speed was greatly reduced with this, and it only caused my annoyance to type with it. So the question stands, why didn't Newstandardkeyboard do their research and conclude that alphabetical is NOT the way to sort the keys on a keyboard. And frankly, I don't think I could find another layout so far away from the words that we type.
And what's with the design? If I had a child, I would give it to him or her with an instruction to throw it out after use
I must object. Just because they are elected doesn't mean it's democratic. For instance, wouldn't it be more democratic if every person running for president was given the same sum of money to do their campaign? I would say so. I know this is a pretty big issue, but my point is only that just because people vote, doesn't make it in any way fair. By the way your note about greek democracy hits you in your face again ;)
Because in ancient greece, only the rich and wealthy were allowed to participate in the democracy, which is kinda what happens in USA too. Only the rich and already powerful people have a chance in the presidential run.
I think what they were supposed to do, was to make a windows xp version without anything bundled, like media player, browser, text editor and so forth. What they actually made was a Windows XP without quality of any kind. How sad. I really don't see how this is going to battle Linux in any way. "Look, you can get a poor operating system for a lot of money and a great operating system for free" What kind of logic is that?
You mean a nested webserver, that only works as long as you keep your browserwindow open? Gee' that's technology! Furthermore, this must be the most reliable anti-slashdotting technique. The moment you remove the 1.5k limit, I am sure people will start mirroring articles on it :)
I can't even find a google cache of it. This is bad karma. Bad bad karma.
If you own one of the more expensive versions of the soundblaster Audigy soundcard, you get a nice remote control. This remotecontrol works in linux with a little program delivered with the driver. It has a basic setup to work with xmms.
First of all, as a citizen of Denmark, I was quite surprised to see this. First of all, it is not long ago a new government was elected. The first thing they did was removing the institude of alternative energy, while the only argument was, that the institude was populated by hippies and leftists (hooray for stalinism, or what?). So how I see this is: "Heck, we arent in the government in 28 years, so its not our fault if it's not there..."
It might be because that most gurus (and me) have learned linux using commands and tricky shortcuts resulting in running either a screen-like window manager, just text mode or ie. blackbox. This is of course how gurus seem to like it, and also a nice and fast way to run linux in. But if you require that a newbie is to use these ways that in his eyes look primitive and a lot of difficult stuff, he might just give up immediatly. So start teaching them kde or something as easy as that. Learn them kwrite not vi, kvirc not epic4 or bitchx etc etc...