For realistic looking weapons, I don't think you could beat Dark Star's missiles. They look like tractor trailer trailers. Big rectangular solids, not aerodynamic at all.
There are all sorts of other things to hate about that movie, but the missile was pretty cool.
It should help me out. I don't use office suites since almost everything I type has to be in plaintext anyway. But, I've got users who need some of the 'advanced' features who are trying out OO as an alternative to Office. I helped one guy hook up to our MySQL server as a source for form letter information. That took way longer than it would have if we had had some help. Another guy has problems with the basics. Not because OO is really different than Office (as far as I know), but just because he doesn't know.
Everyone comes to me for help. Not because I know OO, but because I'm the 'computer guy'. It will help me if support is available and I can say "Call Support" rather than learn how to use the program for them. I hate having to do that.
He doesn't miss that at all. Read it again. Especially the end of the Napoleon - Kant example:
"Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia....in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes. Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete."
Eco is too complicated to jump to assumptions about what his point is. His point is usually more subtle than most. It's often necessary to read everything he says. The way most people write, you can accurately guess everything else they'll say from the first few sentences. This is generally not the case with Eco or many other academic writers that are able to assume their audience is willing to think about what they're saying.
I've found that Eco often makes some seemingly stupid distinctions - like those 3 kinds of memory - in order to get at more important distinctions. His main point here is to discuss the different ways and reasons that we read. He then discusses the effects these distinctions should have on the way we discuss technologies for reading and passing on knowledge.
If you can, attribute that first set of 'weird' stuff to Literature, and concentrate on the meat of the essay later on.
This article should be considered a prerequisite for any slashdotters that want to spout off (from any perspective) about copyright, intellectual property, the future of storage and/or digital rights management.
If you can't get through this article and get something from it, you shouldn't be in the debate.
She's talking about selling advice, basicly. They'll recommend stuff, and they're not tied down to any one technology, she says. I'm sure they'll recommend HP hardware, but they'll also recommend.Net or JSEE without bias, she says.
It sounds like a shift towards a consulting/service business model as hardware becomes a commodity. They're trying to package it like it's a Product, but when questioned, they have to say it's a Goal or a Mindset or a Process.
It's advice. It's probably biased. And while it's probably better than what you'd get from a dozen O'reilly books at a tenth of a percent of the cost, it's not a magic box that you plug in so no one has to code anymore. It's not a secret technology that lets you turn a dial from '5 day delay' to '1 minute delay.' It's JSEE or.Net. You've still got to write it. You've still got to implement the business logic. They'll just help you figure out how to layer your hardware and your apps, I suppose. Stuff you probably should have learned in school.
By a strange coincidence (unless Slashdot is watching me... ), my girlfriend called a little while ago to tell me that we've been invited (really, she's been invited and I get to tag along) to a Rubik's Cube Party. The idea is that everyone wears something that matches each of the cube's colors to the party (6+ pieces of clothing) and leaves wearing just one color.
So, somehow the mind challenger has been turned into a clothes swapping party. Who'd have thought it?
-- A slim subset of HTML seems best to me -- p, br, h1, i, b, maybe tt. Maybe some other details if depending on the domain. Amount and type of whitespace explicitly insignificant.
This is genius. Can we do this? Can we describe a 'lite' styled document format? We can call it an XML format if it makes anyone happy. We'll make it a lite version of html. I vote for h1, b, i, br, and u - as regular < tags >.
We'll have this format (maybe "LSTF" for Lite Styled Text Format?) and provide an easy conversion to full HTML (add head and body tags) and Quark Tag Format (which looks really similar).
We'll write apps that limit people to these choices - no fonts, no sizes in the document, just the display.
Sound good? I'm not being sarcastic, even if I sound a little crazed. I need something that imports into Quark XPress and is easily converted to HTML (or vice versa) that can be stored in a database. This is perfect. I've been thinking about it for a while. My programming isn't quite there yet, but I want to write an app to do this - in Java probably.
If we standardize the format, everyone can use it. It'll be HTML's little brother and SWF's cousin.
I work for a small newspaper and we have related issues. Writers use Word and do all sorts of inconsistent formating (inconsistent from other writers and other paragraphs they wrote). Everything gets placed in Quark XPress and most of the formatting dissappears. Most of the rest of it has to be undone.
It's absurd to use a word processor that costs hundreds of dollars rather than TextEdit or Notepad just to mark a few words bold or italic (that's all the formatting we keep). It's also too tempting for writers to try to insert tables or images or other nonsense that really needs to be submitted as a seperate file. To make it more difficult, Quark 4.x on the Mac won't open an RTF or SimpleText file and retain the little formatting we need. It'll open a proprietary.doc just fine, though. It's rather absurd if you ask me. I've been told that Quark 6 opens RTF files, finally, maybe that will put an end to it.
"Name of the Rose" is probably the best starting point. It was also made into a movie. I consider that to be his most accessible book.
If you've read some Borges, and maybe some Kundera and know a little bit about Post Modernism, jump right into "Island." "Island" is told by a historian/narrator about a manuscript written by a young man in the 1600's who has adventures, but is also not always truthful. There is a lot of subtext about Authorship and Authority surrounding a lot of historical facts. It's a little thick, though, and if you don't appreciate/like that kind of writing, you're not going to like the book as much as others.
Eco is very good at putting you into the mindset of a person of that time (I'm assuming, since I didn't live then... ). You get a good feel for why people believed some of the stuff that now seems crazier than hell. In a sense it's not just historical fiction, but historical religious/science fiction. The books are set at the dawn of science, when things formerly considered witchcraft were starting to be studied. So you have characters expounding on how manipulating the knife that cut you will affect your wound using the logic of the time - which was largely about quoting other authoritative sources. You have a fascination with science and technology at the very earliest.
"Foucault's Pendulum" was one of my least favorite of Eco's books. There was way to much to keep track of for my poor little brain. I can handle some complicated concepts, and make plenty of connections, but the number of proper nouns in that book was way too high for me.
"Name of the Rose" is easier in that regard, but is still a very intelligent book. "The Island of the Day Before" does some weird, meta-writing stuff that I found beautiful. "Travels in Hyper-reality" is a set of non-fiction/essays that are really good as well.
Re:Looking forward... mostly
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I've read most of Stephenson's books. I've only read Snow Crash once - and will never read it again.
Maybe I skipped a page or something, but wasn't there a "Bad Guy" that had a nuclear explosive implanted in him or something? so that a Good Guy couldn't fight him or shoot him or some similar contrivance?
Didn't they kill the Bad Guy later? did they ever take that thing out of him?
Hopefully I just missed it. That confused the hell out of me.
This description reminds me of Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before". Eco's book is set in the 1600s and revolves around the search for a method to measure longitude during war and political and religious intrigue.
Maybe if you like this Stephenson book, you'll like that. Eco's books tend to be a little smarter than most people enjoy, however.
Serious question: Can Python (or Perl, or anything else) interact with other running OS X programs?
That's why we've used Applescript with OS 9 so much. We can write scripts that tell Quark XPress what to do. We can pull info from FileMaker and format it and place it in Quark auto-magicly. We've written scripts that manipulate text in Quark text boxes without ever leaving Quark - like they're just another menu item. We can do similar things with Outlook Express and BBEdit and any number of other apps. I've written a bunch of Applescripts, but very few that didn't interact with at least one commercial application.
Now if I can replace FileMaker <- Applescript -> Quark with MySQL <- Python/Perl/etc -> Quark that would seriously rock. Are you saying I can do that? Can you post a link to some info on getting started?
Another poster posted a link to a Frontline Interview. Near the bottom is this question and answer:
Q: To make more secure infrastructures, if there's one thing that you would stand up and shout about, what would it be?
A: I think that the emphasis for better security really comes from creating a culture. It's not a technical solution. I believe creating a culture where security is a requirement to do business would probably do more for us than any one piece of technology innovation. If we create the culture and the environment where security weaknesses will not be tolerated, and it's top-down driven, and it's supported, it will be supported from the bottom up. And we will be more successful.
It sounds like his focus is on fixing the holes in systems, not applying expensive paint over them. I don't mean to suggest he's perfect, but considering how wrong it could have gone, I am relieved. He sounds technically competent and has experience actually providing security. Too many appointees have connections (political AND business) and nothing else.
Personally, I'm not putting anything in my body that hasn't been tested. I imagine that the research to this point has been focussed on getting these little bots to do stuff and not on whether the material they're made of is toxic, or builds up in your liver, or promotes the clogging of arteries or anything else. They're still at the stage of "look, we made a tiny, tiny motor." They will have to go through a stage of testing before they start injecting people with stuff.
And it's amazing to me how many posts here are suggesting that something needs to be proven dangerous beyond all reasonable doubt before we stop to think about using it. I'm of the opinion that you've got to prove something is safe before unleashing it on the public, whether it's nanobots or the smoke from your chimney.
There's no way I'm putting anything untested in my body. Unless, you know, my best friend does it first and says it feels good...
I'm with you. I was being too subtley sarcastic, maybe.
I really don't understand why anyone puts up with Windows at all. When these sorts of things happen, you really have to wonder what all those claims about 'Ease Of Use' and 'Support' really add up to.
"Pescatore said that the cost of both technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine."
How much does Windows cost?
I know it's not really Microsoft's fault, since they had a patch and it's not their fault that people try to get email and stuff... But my users are rather annoyed. We all run Macs and either Mac OS X or FreeBSD servers so we're not vulnerable to this virus, but it's getting annoying just deleting the things. I can't imagine having to worry about getting infected on top of having to run Windows:)
We got almost all of ours (150 to 5 addresses) from one local government office. I emailed them when we narrowed down what machine they were coming from and the flow has stopped. We didn't get a Thank You or anything, but maybe our little government office doesn't want to publicly admit to running insecure systems.
I wonder if this $500 - $1000 per computer will be in the budget next year.
I think it's because each author believes he/she is writing the One book you will need to begin. As in: "Why would you have 5 other books on the subject when this one is the only one you need?" They're then obligated to start at the very beginning.
It might be interesting for O'Reilly or another publisher (some entity above the Author level) to produce an "Intro to Procedural Programming" and "Intro to OOP" and similar set of books. So that when you wanted to learn something from O'Reilly books, you'd by the $15 Intro book and the $25 Learning book. Like you'd get "Intro to Proceduaral Code" and "Learning C" or "Intro OOP" and "Learning Java" or "Learning C++" instead of one $40 book with redundant information. The Learning books could assume you had the general concepts from the Intro books and just deal with the language specific implementations.
That's a lot of writing for a relatively simple idea. It's like yours, except at the Publisher level. The publisher might be able to assume the responsibility (ie: risk) for a reader to buy two books instead of one.
I'd like to second this. I haven't checked out any of their Math or Physics lectures yet, but have sat through 30+ hours of very watchable videos and a few hours of audio tapes. Some of their stuff seems expensive, but it's all more or less equivelent to auditing a college course from a very good professor.
I love it when some AC comes in with a couple of wildly inaccurate facts about the story and accuses you of not reading the article. I shouldn't even bother with trolls like this, but...
- The details about how the glossy images are printed are NOT in the article.
- They are not printing Wax onto paper.
- They are using Laser, not Inkjet printers.
Nothing you said about the technology or the article was accurate.
I'd like to see some details about how they do this. Our office just got a Xerox color laser printer and would probably use this for some non-security stuff.
When they say "current printers," it sounds like ours would just need a driver upgrade or something. I don't know how that's possible, but I don't know much about hardware and drivers. I'm also curious whether they'll charge for this new "feature" or just include it as an upgrade. Or whether it will only be available on newer high end printers despite working on current technology.
On a related note, people interested in these books may be interested in this story (via metafilter) about how the Qu'ran as it's known now may be a mistranslation of the original.
Slashdot Mirror
For realistic looking weapons, I don't think you could beat Dark Star's missiles. They look like tractor trailer trailers. Big rectangular solids, not aerodynamic at all.
There are all sorts of other things to hate about that movie, but the missile was pretty cool.
It should help me out. I don't use office suites since almost everything I type has to be in plaintext anyway. But, I've got users who need some of the 'advanced' features who are trying out OO as an alternative to Office. I helped one guy hook up to our MySQL server as a source for form letter information. That took way longer than it would have if we had had some help. Another guy has problems with the basics. Not because OO is really different than Office (as far as I know), but just because he doesn't know.
Everyone comes to me for help. Not because I know OO, but because I'm the 'computer guy'. It will help me if support is available and I can say "Call Support" rather than learn how to use the program for them. I hate having to do that.
He doesn't miss that at all. Read it again. Especially the end of the Napoleon - Kant example:
...in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes. Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete."
"Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia.
Eco is too complicated to jump to assumptions about what his point is. His point is usually more subtle than most. It's often necessary to read everything he says. The way most people write, you can accurately guess everything else they'll say from the first few sentences. This is generally not the case with Eco or many other academic writers that are able to assume their audience is willing to think about what they're saying.
I've found that Eco often makes some seemingly stupid distinctions - like those 3 kinds of memory - in order to get at more important distinctions. His main point here is to discuss the different ways and reasons that we read. He then discusses the effects these distinctions should have on the way we discuss technologies for reading and passing on knowledge.
If you can, attribute that first set of 'weird' stuff to Literature, and concentrate on the meat of the essay later on.
This article should be considered a prerequisite for any slashdotters that want to spout off (from any perspective) about copyright, intellectual property, the future of storage and/or digital rights management.
If you can't get through this article and get something from it, you shouldn't be in the debate.
Except they didn't even make it!
.Net or JSEE without bias, she says.
.Net. You've still got to write it. You've still got to implement the business logic. They'll just help you figure out how to layer your hardware and your apps, I suppose. Stuff you probably should have learned in school.
She's talking about selling advice, basicly. They'll recommend stuff, and they're not tied down to any one technology, she says. I'm sure they'll recommend HP hardware, but they'll also recommend
It sounds like a shift towards a consulting/service business model as hardware becomes a commodity. They're trying to package it like it's a Product, but when questioned, they have to say it's a Goal or a Mindset or a Process.
It's advice. It's probably biased. And while it's probably better than what you'd get from a dozen O'reilly books at a tenth of a percent of the cost, it's not a magic box that you plug in so no one has to code anymore. It's not a secret technology that lets you turn a dial from '5 day delay' to '1 minute delay.' It's JSEE or
By a strange coincidence (unless Slashdot is watching me... ), my girlfriend called a little while ago to tell me that we've been invited (really, she's been invited and I get to tag along) to a Rubik's Cube Party. The idea is that everyone wears something that matches each of the cube's colors to the party (6+ pieces of clothing) and leaves wearing just one color.
So, somehow the mind challenger has been turned into a clothes swapping party. Who'd have thought it?
Sometimes the DOJ will serve Justice better by not being capable of doing what they want to do.
-- A slim subset of HTML seems best to me -- p, br, h1, i, b, maybe tt. Maybe some other details if depending on the domain. Amount and type of whitespace explicitly insignificant.
This is genius. Can we do this? Can we describe a 'lite' styled document format? We can call it an XML format if it makes anyone happy. We'll make it a lite version of html. I vote for h1, b, i, br, and u - as regular < tags >.
We'll have this format (maybe "LSTF" for Lite Styled Text Format?) and provide an easy conversion to full HTML (add head and body tags) and Quark Tag Format (which looks really similar).
We'll write apps that limit people to these choices - no fonts, no sizes in the document, just the display.
Sound good? I'm not being sarcastic, even if I sound a little crazed. I need something that imports into Quark XPress and is easily converted to HTML (or vice versa) that can be stored in a database. This is perfect. I've been thinking about it for a while. My programming isn't quite there yet, but I want to write an app to do this - in Java probably.
If we standardize the format, everyone can use it. It'll be HTML's little brother and SWF's cousin.
I work for a small newspaper and we have related issues. Writers use Word and do all sorts of inconsistent formating (inconsistent from other writers and other paragraphs they wrote). Everything gets placed in Quark XPress and most of the formatting dissappears. Most of the rest of it has to be undone.
.doc just fine, though. It's rather absurd if you ask me. I've been told that Quark 6 opens RTF files, finally, maybe that will put an end to it.
It's absurd to use a word processor that costs hundreds of dollars rather than TextEdit or Notepad just to mark a few words bold or italic (that's all the formatting we keep). It's also too tempting for writers to try to insert tables or images or other nonsense that really needs to be submitted as a seperate file. To make it more difficult, Quark 4.x on the Mac won't open an RTF or SimpleText file and retain the little formatting we need. It'll open a proprietary
"Name of the Rose" is probably the best starting point. It was also made into a movie. I consider that to be his most accessible book.
If you've read some Borges, and maybe some Kundera and know a little bit about Post Modernism, jump right into "Island." "Island" is told by a historian/narrator about a manuscript written by a young man in the 1600's who has adventures, but is also not always truthful. There is a lot of subtext about Authorship and Authority surrounding a lot of historical facts. It's a little thick, though, and if you don't appreciate/like that kind of writing, you're not going to like the book as much as others.
Eco is very good at putting you into the mindset of a person of that time (I'm assuming, since I didn't live then... ). You get a good feel for why people believed some of the stuff that now seems crazier than hell. In a sense it's not just historical fiction, but historical religious/science fiction. The books are set at the dawn of science, when things formerly considered witchcraft were starting to be studied. So you have characters expounding on how manipulating the knife that cut you will affect your wound using the logic of the time - which was largely about quoting other authoritative sources. You have a fascination with science and technology at the very earliest.
Anyway, definitely get one of them.
"Foucault's Pendulum" was one of my least favorite of Eco's books. There was way to much to keep track of for my poor little brain. I can handle some complicated concepts, and make plenty of connections, but the number of proper nouns in that book was way too high for me.
"Name of the Rose" is easier in that regard, but is still a very intelligent book. "The Island of the Day Before" does some weird, meta-writing stuff that I found beautiful. "Travels in Hyper-reality" is a set of non-fiction/essays that are really good as well.
I've read most of Stephenson's books. I've only read Snow Crash once - and will never read it again.
Maybe I skipped a page or something, but wasn't there a "Bad Guy" that had a nuclear explosive implanted in him or something? so that a Good Guy couldn't fight him or shoot him or some similar contrivance?
Didn't they kill the Bad Guy later? did they ever take that thing out of him?
Hopefully I just missed it. That confused the hell out of me.
This description reminds me of Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before". Eco's book is set in the 1600s and revolves around the search for a method to measure longitude during war and political and religious intrigue.
Maybe if you like this Stephenson book, you'll like that. Eco's books tend to be a little smarter than most people enjoy, however.
Serious question:
Can Python (or Perl, or anything else) interact with other running OS X programs?
That's why we've used Applescript with OS 9 so much. We can write scripts that tell Quark XPress what to do. We can pull info from FileMaker and format it and place it in Quark auto-magicly. We've written scripts that manipulate text in Quark text boxes without ever leaving Quark - like they're just another menu item. We can do similar things with Outlook Express and BBEdit and any number of other apps. I've written a bunch of Applescripts, but very few that didn't interact with at least one commercial application.
Now if I can replace
FileMaker <- Applescript -> Quark
with
MySQL <- Python/Perl/etc -> Quark
that would seriously rock. Are you saying I can do that? Can you post a link to some info on getting started?
Another poster posted a link to a Frontline Interview. Near the bottom is this question and answer:
Q: To make more secure infrastructures, if there's one thing that you would stand up and shout about, what would it be?
A: I think that the emphasis for better security really comes from creating a culture. It's not a technical solution. I believe creating a culture where security is a requirement to do business would probably do more for us than any one piece of technology innovation. If we create the culture and the environment where security weaknesses will not be tolerated, and it's top-down driven, and it's supported, it will be supported from the bottom up. And we will be more successful.
It sounds like his focus is on fixing the holes in systems, not applying expensive paint over them. I don't mean to suggest he's perfect, but considering how wrong it could have gone, I am relieved. He sounds technically competent and has experience actually providing security. Too many appointees have connections (political AND business) and nothing else.
This sounds much, much better than it could have been.
I was predicting the worst...
someone with no technical background,
someone from Justice Dept,
someone corporate goon from Microsoft...
I am relieved.
Personally, I'm not putting anything in my body that hasn't been tested. I imagine that the research to this point has been focussed on getting these little bots to do stuff and not on whether the material they're made of is toxic, or builds up in your liver, or promotes the clogging of arteries or anything else. They're still at the stage of "look, we made a tiny, tiny motor." They will have to go through a stage of testing before they start injecting people with stuff.
And it's amazing to me how many posts here are suggesting that something needs to be proven dangerous beyond all reasonable doubt before we stop to think about using it. I'm of the opinion that you've got to prove something is safe before unleashing it on the public, whether it's nanobots or the smoke from your chimney.
There's no way I'm putting anything untested in my body. Unless, you know, my best friend does it first and says it feels good...
I'm with you. I was being too subtley sarcastic, maybe.
I really don't understand why anyone puts up with Windows at all. When these sorts of things happen, you really have to wonder what all those claims about 'Ease Of Use' and 'Support' really add up to.
Or really, you don't have to wonder at all.
"Pescatore said that the cost of both technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine."
:)
How much does Windows cost?
I know it's not really Microsoft's fault, since they had a patch and it's not their fault that people try to get email and stuff... But my users are rather annoyed. We all run Macs and either Mac OS X or FreeBSD servers so we're not vulnerable to this virus, but it's getting annoying just deleting the things. I can't imagine having to worry about getting infected on top of having to run Windows
We got almost all of ours (150 to 5 addresses) from one local government office. I emailed them when we narrowed down what machine they were coming from and the flow has stopped. We didn't get a Thank You or anything, but maybe our little government office doesn't want to publicly admit to running insecure systems.
I wonder if this $500 - $1000 per computer will be in the budget next year.
I think it's because each author believes he/she is writing the One book you will need to begin. As in: "Why would you have 5 other books on the subject when this one is the only one you need?" They're then obligated to start at the very beginning.
It might be interesting for O'Reilly or another publisher (some entity above the Author level) to produce an "Intro to Procedural Programming" and "Intro to OOP" and similar set of books. So that when you wanted to learn something from O'Reilly books, you'd by the $15 Intro book and the $25 Learning book. Like you'd get "Intro to Proceduaral Code" and "Learning C" or "Intro OOP" and "Learning Java" or "Learning C++" instead of one $40 book with redundant information. The Learning books could assume you had the general concepts from the Intro books and just deal with the language specific implementations.
That's a lot of writing for a relatively simple idea. It's like yours, except at the Publisher level. The publisher might be able to assume the responsibility (ie: risk) for a reader to buy two books instead of one.
I'd like to second this. I haven't checked out any of their Math or Physics lectures yet, but have sat through 30+ hours of very watchable videos and a few hours of audio tapes. Some of their stuff seems expensive, but it's all more or less equivelent to auditing a college course from a very good professor.
I love it when some AC comes in with a couple of wildly inaccurate facts about the story and accuses you of not reading the article. I shouldn't even bother with trolls like this, but...
- The details about how the glossy images are printed are NOT in the article.
- They are not printing Wax onto paper.
- They are using Laser, not Inkjet printers.
Nothing you said about the technology or the article was accurate.
I'd like to see some details about how they do this. Our office just got a Xerox color laser printer and would probably use this for some non-security stuff.
When they say "current printers," it sounds like ours would just need a driver upgrade or something. I don't know how that's possible, but I don't know much about hardware and drivers. I'm also curious whether they'll charge for this new "feature" or just include it as an upgrade. Or whether it will only be available on newer high end printers despite working on current technology.
On a related note, people interested in these books may be interested in this story (via metafilter) about how the Qu'ran as it's known now may be a mistranslation of the original.