Re:Why I believe this book to be of interest.
on
Prime Obsession
·
· Score: 1
Thanks, I'd seen many that pointed out slashdot's 120 character limit on sigs, and I thought "Hmm, how can I take that idea, and nerd it up." This is what I came up with;)
Why I believe this book to be of interest.
on
Prime Obsession
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I know very few mathematicians and math students who aren't familiar with the Riemann Hypothesis (largely due to the million dollar prize associated with its proof), so a book exclusively on such a topic probably wouldn't interest too many people. What makes this book interesting, at least to me, is the Math History covered in it. In particular, the author goes into great depth into the personality and character of each of the principle figures in this book: the anecdote regarding Hilbert's torn pants, Gauss's (perhaps justified) arrogance, and Riemann's quiet nature. All of these aspects of the book add a lot more depth to the people behind this problem, and I find that to be far more valuable, as a mathematician, than yet another essay on the Riemann Hypothesis.
I agree with the reviewer's sentiment that the book is well written, and it is very enjoyable. The author writes in a very audience-centric fashion, even going as far to discuss the "scaffolding" of the book itself (all of the "hard math" stuff is found in odd chapters, the author had debated putting this information in only the "prime" chapters, but then said "there is such a thing as being too cute.")
Anywho, if you have a math friend you need to buy a gift for, definitely consider this book.
Hahaha, that's by far the most humorous post I've read today.
You would think the moderators would realize that if a post starts with "I have a modest proposal...", it's clearly meant to be satyrical. Apparently we need to get Swift's "A Modest Proposal" circulated to more people.
I'm starting to wonder what the real issue with bootlegging is. As you and others have already pointed out, seeing a bootlegged version of the movie is like watching it in the theater while having a seizure. I don't know of anyone who saw a bootlegged movie and thought "Wow, that was so good, I don't need to see the movie in the theater now!"
However, I do know a few people, myself included, who saw a bootleg and said "Wow, this movie sucks, the quality of the bootleg does it justice." And I think that's really what the movie industry is out to stop.
Consider an example, "Alien vs. Predator." I saw this movie in the theaters, despite the PG-13 rating, despite the number of 8-14 year olds, despite the fact I knew it was going to be complete cheese. It wasn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but the geek in me enjoyed it none the less. However, if I were not as enthusiastic about an Alien/Predator crossover film, and I had seen a bootleg (or even read a single review, apparently Fox Entertainment did a pretty good job at keeping this from being thoroughly screened before its theatrical release), I probably never would've paid money to see it.
The primary goal of the movie industry is to profit on its products, even the ones that are complete shit. If we're suddenly given a tool that will tell us the movie's total crap before we spend money to see it, this will turn such films into a spectacular bomb. And I think this is ultimately what the movie industry is out to stop.
So, in my opinion, it's more about the movie industry not getting its "share" of twenty spots from suckers than it is about protecting the IP of movies in general.
I concur with your remarks. In particular the discussion of swaret. The author is discussing distros here, they should be weighed on their own, out of the box, merits. I personally have pretty mixed feelings on swaret (worked fine for me when upgrading from a cd, bombed on me when upgrading over a net connection), but including a discussion on it in a comparison of distros is a bit misleading. Especially without a discussion of some of swaret's problems. I don't know how many other people have experienced it, but when I tried to upgrade slack to current over a net connection, it bombed on me, when I did it via cd, it worked fine. Giving readers the impression that "slackware + swaret = strong package management," is probably very bad advice. Compare the distros based on their out-of-the-box merits, not by what you can do when third party apps are added.
And to support your final claim, most of the apps I install, after initial slackware setup, are done via./configure; make; make install, and it might have helped those who know little or nothing about slackware if they were told that this becomes a common procedure, even with.tgz packages.
The author examines slackware and arch in a number of categories, giving one distro an advantage here, and the other one an advantage there. His final conclusion is, "[so], overall, it's a tie. Depending on your needs, it's either Slack or Arch."
So his advice is, depending on what you need, one distro might be better for you than another. That's hardly insight. It is akin to comparing and contrasting C# and Java at this point. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, ymmv, etc.
The author then says: "[but] in no case --at least for me-- would I choose the bloatware that is in other distros."
I have never used Arch Linux, but I have been running Slackware for quite a while now (dual booting in the past, stand-alone now), and if you do a total install, you eat up 2-3 gigs of space. It can be a lean install, but there's plenty of room for it to be bloated as well. Again, any distro with even the most primitive package management tools would have the same ability, though the difficulty involved may vary.
If you have never looked into Arch or Slackware, this article is mildly informative as it conveys the design philosophies behind these two distros. However, knowing something about Slackware's reputation and reading this article's summary was enough to tell me the distros had similar goals, and that's really all that I took away from the article as well.
And after just double checking to make sure the preference still didn't work, I discovered, it now does. So kindly disregard this message.
And to the mods, if you want to mod something informative, mod this post so people know the option is again available. My parent post is completely wrong now. (Except for getting cheap thrills from twisted panties)
Actually, you can't do that (modifying what stories are on the front page.) It's available as a setting, but it does nothing at this time. It's a known bug, apparently the developers of slashcode are kicking around how best to do this, and what all should be included/excluded by those settings..blah blah. Long story short, too late, these flamefests become front page news for everyone, no matter what preferences you have set.
I'm not really bitching here, I get cheap thrills out of watching people get their panties in a twist, but I just wanted to point out that supressing this garbage is not possible at this time.
Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to micropolitics-users who have heard enough about the electoral college anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but... Time for some serious flamefesting!
Just to let you know, someone replying did in fact get the joke;)
Unfortunately, I'm probably not the same person, as I've never spent any real amount of time MUDing. The sig is just a rot-13 encoded message saying something to the effect of "This sig has wasted some of your time," I can't remember the exact wording, and I'm far to lazy to translate it;)
I do agree that in most cases the lack of displayed text would be noticed in a matter of moments. I noticed it right away. However, if we're talking about usernames and passwords, enough info might be retrieved to be damaging. For instance, when I'm logging on to gmail, the username field has the focus, so I imediately begin typing that, hit a tab and start with the password, I could get through a fair portion of my password before realizing that the fields don't have the proper focus. Now, for well chosen passwords, that might not be so damning. But when people use the word "password" for a password, one should be careful.
I would not go as far as to say this is a critical vulnerability, the createPopup() function in IE was far more damning, but I would consider it something that should be addressed. Even if it's not a critical issue, it does violate certain design principles/visual metaphors (if I can borrow a term Tufte seems to love), in that if a given view is not active, it's components should not have the focus of the keyboard, or any other input device.
While I agree with that sentiment on the first exploit (though it would be nice if the parent of the dialog box were displayed when the dialog box is displayed, if the parent is not already active), the second one is a bit more serious.
A form element should not be allowed to steal the focus when it's parent is not active. With a fairly simple timer (like the ones this guys already using), a javascript...script, could call document.myform.submit after a few minutes to harvest all of the text entered in another page.
Forms should be strictly tied to their containers, and focus requests should be restricted only to the currently active window/tab/whathaveyou. I suspect that the reason this is an issue is because technically the form and the citibank page are both in the same window, the tabs are merely controlling what components are visible at any given point in time.
Seems that way. I'm not too terribly thrilled with the idea. While any branch of the kernel may have bugs, at least I could immediately tell which branches were working towards stability versus which branches were developing experimental stuff.
You might want to read this discussion. It seems the old way of doing things, using even sub-versions for stable and odd for testing is no longer going to be done. So, a 2.7 kernel is not going to happen for quite some time.
This argument is akin to the RIAA's argument of "They download music, we lost those profits!"
In order for a vote for a third party to be a vote Kerry truly lost, you must assume that the person voting would have voted for Kerry if the third party had not been present. For me, and I imagine others (at least one other out there?), this is not the case. If I had to choose between only Kerry and Bush, I'd abstain from voting.
Despite a couple replies you've gotten to this, I would like to say I do agree with you.
I feel there are three reasons why I will "waste my vote" on a third party this November, even though I live in a swing state this year (Pennsylvania.)
I'm not going to vote for Kerry because even though I don't like Bush, I don't like Kerry either. If the Democrats really want my vote, provide me with a better offer.
The fight to keep Nader off of the Florida ballot, and then the badmouthing that ensued when the courts finally said Nader could be on it really bothers me. How is it that when one group oppresses another to get their way it's bad, but when a different group oppresses another, it's somehow ok?
It is precisely the policy of voting for the lesser of two evils that keeps us in a 2 party system. Other countries do have multiple active parties, it is not an impossibility.
And finally, the most important point, I want to vote for someone I actually support. Being accused of "stealing a vote" from Kerry by voting third party is akin to the RIAA's talks of theft. If I don't vote for a third party, there's no guarantee I would've voted at all. In fact, if I don't/can't vote for a third party, I probably will note vote. So, either way, that vote for Kerry is lost.
And for further information, the virus MacAfee reported on was called Perrun. You can read more about it here. The advisory was issued in mid 2002, and is entirely seperate from the issue at hand.
No, we need not offer Macafee or Symantic or any other AV company reporting a JPEG virus an apology. The AV company in question proposed this as a virus: a real virus/backdoor/trojan/whathaveyou that would be installed on a system that would change how Explorer handles the.jpeg extension. Basically passing all jpeg files to this new virus program when they're double clicked. The program would make an attempt to translate the jpeg into instructions and perform said instructions. So, you need a real virus to change an extension, then specially crafted.jpeg files (which probably would not be valid jpegs at that point) to make use of this program.
Here is why they need no apology, you could implement this system with ANY type of file, even using extensions that aren't used by any other program (for instance:.holyfuckshit, which probably is used by something, but anywho...) The AV company used.jpeg files because jpegs are everywhere and it would instill a sense of fear. This new exploit is NOT what they were predicting at all.
Indeed, I entirely agree with your point. I think in certain markets, in particulary internet portals, the cost of entry is substantially lower than other common markets. For instance, consider this very site (as well as many others.) There is a required investment in webhosting, domain registration, and the like, and while these are recurring fees, they are really the only fees to starting and maintaining a web-based technology. If you provide content that caters to some particular crowd, you can use word of mouth (word of blogs may be more appropriate) to draw a customer base. At that point, you can generate revenue through advertising or subscription based services, allowing you to expand further. Obviously this point is being trivialized a bit, but the bottom line, in my opinion, is that the Internet provides a pretty good model of how competition works fairly effectively to keep the market stimulated and provide us with choice. Even if google becomes some monolithic, faceless, evil corporate entity in the eyes of its once faithful, a new interation of google will arise.
Funny, the more I type, and the more I think about this, the more I realize I really do support a number of the ideals of the Libertarian Party.
Anywho, that's all for now.
Taking this excerpt from a BBC article into account, "it is the first time in decades that economy has not topped the list of concerns - security came first with 41%, while 26% cited the economy," I would say that when even economic concerns are not the chief issue, issues of science are bound to be very low on the list.
I'd like to start by saying I'm not taking an issue with you personally. I'd just like to point out something about the phrase "selling out," as used in your post.
Despite what people might want to believe, Google is not the latest rock/alternative band from small town America. It is a company, and a company's goal, no matter what the PR tells you, is to make money. Of course a company sells out, it starts selling out the minute it is formed.
More importantly, and perhaps more on topic, if you expected Google to take a stand against oppressive governments because of the "Don't be evil" slogan, then you're probably going to be very disappointed to learn that GE, in fact, does not always bring good things to life. "Don't be evil" is just a catchy slogan, no matter how Google's PR people try to spin it. It's only goal is to attract customers and investors. It is not a contract, or a sacred promise offered to you under pain of death.
Anywho, that concludes my early morning rant. If you are seriously disillusioned by Google over the issue of censorship, perhaps you need to reevaluate how you view corporations. They are your friend only to the extent necessary to do business (and hopefully keep doing business) with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I'd seen many that pointed out slashdot's 120 character limit on sigs, and I thought "Hmm, how can I take that idea, and nerd it up." This is what I came up with ;)
I know very few mathematicians and math students who aren't familiar with the Riemann Hypothesis (largely due to the million dollar prize associated with its proof), so a book exclusively on such a topic probably wouldn't interest too many people. What makes this book interesting, at least to me, is the Math History covered in it. In particular, the author goes into great depth into the personality and character of each of the principle figures in this book: the anecdote regarding Hilbert's torn pants, Gauss's (perhaps justified) arrogance, and Riemann's quiet nature. All of these aspects of the book add a lot more depth to the people behind this problem, and I find that to be far more valuable, as a mathematician, than yet another essay on the Riemann Hypothesis.
I agree with the reviewer's sentiment that the book is well written, and it is very enjoyable. The author writes in a very audience-centric fashion, even going as far to discuss the "scaffolding" of the book itself (all of the "hard math" stuff is found in odd chapters, the author had debated putting this information in only the "prime" chapters, but then said "there is such a thing as being too cute.")
Anywho, if you have a math friend you need to buy a gift for, definitely consider this book.
Hahaha, that's by far the most humorous post I've read today.
...", it's clearly meant to be satyrical. Apparently we need to get Swift's "A Modest Proposal" circulated to more people.
You would think the moderators would realize that if a post starts with "I have a modest proposal
Well said, and a fair point. I think you could have best summed up the entire point just by posting your sig alone ;)
Another reply to your probably rhetorical question: Blue Man Group - The Complex.
I'm starting to wonder what the real issue with bootlegging is. As you and others have already pointed out, seeing a bootlegged version of the movie is like watching it in the theater while having a seizure. I don't know of anyone who saw a bootlegged movie and thought "Wow, that was so good, I don't need to see the movie in the theater now!"
However, I do know a few people, myself included, who saw a bootleg and said "Wow, this movie sucks, the quality of the bootleg does it justice." And I think that's really what the movie industry is out to stop.
Consider an example, "Alien vs. Predator." I saw this movie in the theaters, despite the PG-13 rating, despite the number of 8-14 year olds, despite the fact I knew it was going to be complete cheese. It wasn't a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but the geek in me enjoyed it none the less. However, if I were not as enthusiastic about an Alien/Predator crossover film, and I had seen a bootleg (or even read a single review, apparently Fox Entertainment did a pretty good job at keeping this from being thoroughly screened before its theatrical release), I probably never would've paid money to see it.
The primary goal of the movie industry is to profit on its products, even the ones that are complete shit. If we're suddenly given a tool that will tell us the movie's total crap before we spend money to see it, this will turn such films into a spectacular bomb. And I think this is ultimately what the movie industry is out to stop.
So, in my opinion, it's more about the movie industry not getting its "share" of twenty spots from suckers than it is about protecting the IP of movies in general.
I concur with your remarks. In particular the discussion of swaret. The author is discussing distros here, they should be weighed on their own, out of the box, merits. I personally have pretty mixed feelings on swaret (worked fine for me when upgrading from a cd, bombed on me when upgrading over a net connection), but including a discussion on it in a comparison of distros is a bit misleading. Especially without a discussion of some of swaret's problems. I don't know how many other people have experienced it, but when I tried to upgrade slack to current over a net connection, it bombed on me, when I did it via cd, it worked fine. Giving readers the impression that "slackware + swaret = strong package management," is probably very bad advice. Compare the distros based on their out-of-the-box merits, not by what you can do when third party apps are added.
./configure; make; make install, and it might have helped those who know little or nothing about slackware if they were told that this becomes a common procedure, even with .tgz packages.
And to support your final claim, most of the apps I install, after initial slackware setup, are done via
The author examines slackware and arch in a number of categories, giving one distro an advantage here, and the other one an advantage there. His final conclusion is, "[so], overall, it's a tie. Depending on your needs, it's either Slack or Arch."
So his advice is, depending on what you need, one distro might be better for you than another. That's hardly insight. It is akin to comparing and contrasting C# and Java at this point. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, ymmv, etc.
The author then says: "[but] in no case --at least for me-- would I choose the bloatware that is in other distros."
I have never used Arch Linux, but I have been running Slackware for quite a while now (dual booting in the past, stand-alone now), and if you do a total install, you eat up 2-3 gigs of space. It can be a lean install, but there's plenty of room for it to be bloated as well. Again, any distro with even the most primitive package management tools would have the same ability, though the difficulty involved may vary.
If you have never looked into Arch or Slackware, this article is mildly informative as it conveys the design philosophies behind these two distros. However, knowing something about Slackware's reputation and reading this article's summary was enough to tell me the distros had similar goals, and that's really all that I took away from the article as well.
And after just double checking to make sure the preference still didn't work, I discovered, it now does. So kindly disregard this message.
And to the mods, if you want to mod something informative, mod this post so people know the option is again available. My parent post is completely wrong now. (Except for getting cheap thrills from twisted panties)
Actually, you can't do that (modifying what stories are on the front page.) It's available as a setting, but it does nothing at this time. It's a known bug, apparently the developers of slashcode are kicking around how best to do this, and what all should be included/excluded by those settings..blah blah. Long story short, too late, these flamefests become front page news for everyone, no matter what preferences you have set.
I'm not really bitching here, I get cheap thrills out of watching people get their panties in a twist, but I just wanted to point out that supressing this garbage is not possible at this time.
Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. ... Time for some
;)
Apologies to micropolitics-users who have heard enough about the electoral college anyway. I'd
like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but
serious flamefesting!
Just to let you know, someone replying did in fact get the joke
Haha, I do find great humor in that :)
Unfortunately, I'm probably not the same person, as I've never spent any real amount of time MUDing. The sig is just a rot-13 encoded message saying something to the effect of "This sig has wasted some of your time," I can't remember the exact wording, and I'm far to lazy to translate it ;)
I do agree that in most cases the lack of displayed text would be noticed in a matter of moments. I noticed it right away. However, if we're talking about usernames and passwords, enough info might be retrieved to be damaging. For instance, when I'm logging on to gmail, the username field has the focus, so I imediately begin typing that, hit a tab and start with the password, I could get through a fair portion of my password before realizing that the fields don't have the proper focus. Now, for well chosen passwords, that might not be so damning. But when people use the word "password" for a password, one should be careful.
I would not go as far as to say this is a critical vulnerability, the createPopup() function in IE was far more damning, but I would consider it something that should be addressed. Even if it's not a critical issue, it does violate certain design principles/visual metaphors (if I can borrow a term Tufte seems to love), in that if a given view is not active, it's components should not have the focus of the keyboard, or any other input device.
While I agree with that sentiment on the first exploit (though it would be nice if the parent of the dialog box were displayed when the dialog box is displayed, if the parent is not already active), the second one is a bit more serious. ...script, could call document.myform.submit after a few minutes to harvest all of the text entered in another page.
A form element should not be allowed to steal the focus when it's parent is not active. With a fairly simple timer (like the ones this guys already using), a javascript
Forms should be strictly tied to their containers, and focus requests should be restricted only to the currently active window/tab/whathaveyou. I suspect that the reason this is an issue is because technically the form and the citibank page are both in the same window, the tabs are merely controlling what components are visible at any given point in time.
Seems that way. I'm not too terribly thrilled with the idea. While any branch of the kernel may have bugs, at least I could immediately tell which branches were working towards stability versus which branches were developing experimental stuff.
You might want to read this discussion. It seems the old way of doing things, using even sub-versions for stable and odd for testing is no longer going to be done. So, a 2.7 kernel is not going to happen for quite some time.
Indeed, I do. I also have a great fascination with "solving" sigs like this :)
This argument is akin to the RIAA's argument of "They download music, we lost those profits!"
In order for a vote for a third party to be a vote Kerry truly lost, you must assume that the person voting would have voted for Kerry if the third party had not been present. For me, and I imagine others (at least one other out there?), this is not the case. If I had to choose between only Kerry and Bush, I'd abstain from voting.
I feel there are three reasons why I will "waste my vote" on a third party this November, even though I live in a swing state this year (Pennsylvania.)
And for further information, the virus MacAfee reported on was called Perrun. You can read more about it here. The advisory was issued in mid 2002, and is entirely seperate from the issue at hand.
No, we need not offer Macafee or Symantic or any other AV company reporting a JPEG virus an apology. The AV company in question proposed this as a virus: a real virus/backdoor/trojan/whathaveyou that would be installed on a system that would change how Explorer handles the .jpeg extension. Basically passing all jpeg files to this new virus program when they're double clicked. The program would make an attempt to translate the jpeg into instructions and perform said instructions. So, you need a real virus to change an extension, then specially crafted .jpeg files (which probably would not be valid jpegs at that point) to make use of this program. .holyfuckshit, which probably is used by something, but anywho...) The AV company used .jpeg files because jpegs are everywhere and it would instill a sense of fear. This new exploit is NOT what they were predicting at all.
Here is why they need no apology, you could implement this system with ANY type of file, even using extensions that aren't used by any other program (for instance:
Indeed, I entirely agree with your point. I think in certain markets, in particulary internet portals, the cost of entry is substantially lower than other common markets. For instance, consider this very site (as well as many others.) There is a required investment in webhosting, domain registration, and the like, and while these are recurring fees, they are really the only fees to starting and maintaining a web-based technology. If you provide content that caters to some particular crowd, you can use word of mouth (word of blogs may be more appropriate) to draw a customer base. At that point, you can generate revenue through advertising or subscription based services, allowing you to expand further. Obviously this point is being trivialized a bit, but the bottom line, in my opinion, is that the Internet provides a pretty good model of how competition works fairly effectively to keep the market stimulated and provide us with choice. Even if google becomes some monolithic, faceless, evil corporate entity in the eyes of its once faithful, a new interation of google will arise.
Funny, the more I type, and the more I think about this, the more I realize I really do support a number of the ideals of the Libertarian Party.
Anywho, that's all for now.
Taking this excerpt from a BBC article into account, "it is the first time in decades that economy has not topped the list of concerns - security came first with 41%, while 26% cited the economy," I would say that when even economic concerns are not the chief issue, issues of science are bound to be very low on the list.
For anyone interested, here is the complete article.
I'd like to start by saying I'm not taking an issue with you personally. I'd just like to point out something about the phrase "selling out," as used in your post.
Despite what people might want to believe, Google is not the latest rock/alternative band from small town America. It is a company, and a company's goal, no matter what the PR tells you, is to make money. Of course a company sells out, it starts selling out the minute it is formed.
More importantly, and perhaps more on topic, if you expected Google to take a stand against oppressive governments because of the "Don't be evil" slogan, then you're probably going to be very disappointed to learn that GE, in fact, does not always bring good things to life. "Don't be evil" is just a catchy slogan, no matter how Google's PR people try to spin it. It's only goal is to attract customers and investors. It is not a contract, or a sacred promise offered to you under pain of death.
Anywho, that concludes my early morning rant. If you are seriously disillusioned by Google over the issue of censorship, perhaps you need to reevaluate how you view corporations. They are your friend only to the extent necessary to do business (and hopefully keep doing business) with you.