Re:What earthly use is "firefoxurl" anyway?!
on
Firefox Quickies
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· Score: 1
Without actually looking it up, I'd guess this feature is useful for example if you develop XUL-based applications and the like. You could then link to the XUL application on your website, and IE (if you're using it to browse the site) would open the application in FF.
IIRC, Sunbird und Google Calendar support open standards, and CPAN is full of Palm-related modules, so i'd guess that that shouldn't really be that hard to do.
Star Control 4 should really get a prize for being the most disappointing sequel/continuation ever made. Additionally, because it did so poorly, the real developers never got a chance to make a worthy successor to the incredible game that Star Control 2 was. If you haven played it yet, and dont mind the only slightly outdated graphics, SC2 was released under the name The Ur-Quan Masters under the GPL.
This would be great if Apple includes something along the lines of Google Gears on it, and makes that easy to develop for. It ould be the best of both worlds: easy development (but with almost no limit on how complex the App would be), and a nice online/offline compromise.
Just a little question i've been asking myself for ages: Why do current theories postulate the the universe will NOT contract back to a singularity after a (long) while? I thought i kind of understood the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory that used to popular, since gravity works at infinite distances, and should thus, ever so slowly, decelerate the expansion of the universe, or at least the fact that galaxies are traveling away from each other. AFAIU (understand), the constant acceleration of things in the universe (in part by the expansion of the universe) away from each other is powered by left-over energy from the Big Bang, which should be a finite amount of energy.
So why does the ever-so-soft tugging of inter-galaxy gravity, over an infinite amount of time, NOT lead to a Big Crunch? Any Astrophysicist car to enlighten me? I really want to understand this...
The killer game for the OLPC would be an open-sourced "The Incredible Machine" clone, i think. Whatever happened to that franchise, anyhow?One of the greatest non-violent games ever created, IMHO.
Something along the SimCity games would be cool, too, i guess.
Maybe the owners of those franchises (Dynamix [?] and Maxis) could even help out a bit, for PR reasons?
In the (highly recommended) movie "The Prestige", one of the main characters tries to explain how (stage) magic works. His theory is basically that Humans know how mundane, boring, and in it's essence simple life and our existence is, but that we'd love it to not be that simple. Thus, there is a certain bias to look for - and accept - things that are 'magical', if only to make our brief stay in this universe appear a bit more meaningful. I always thought that this was a great explanation for conspiracies and religion, too.
This isn't about blame. It's about how to avoid, or at least minimize the risk of, something like this happening again. Just because you managed to stand up for yourself doesn't mean that others can. So the problem is what to do about these people that for one reason or another can't stand up for themselves. Should we lock them all up? Should we ignore them? Should we keep on picking on them?
I agree that the direct blame for pulling the trigger is his (duh!), but leaving it at that that doesn't really help anybody. Some societies are a great fertile ground for people that pull triggers to grow on, so maybe we should see whether there's anything we can do about that.
I, for one, would not want the browser wars to be over - as someone else pointed out, the fact that there's a "war" going on is a good thing, since that means that web developers, frameworks and companies all have to think of the other browsers, instead of only IE, as they did ca. 5 years ago. This, in turn, means that they will try to stick to the official standards (as much as they can), which in turn means that if I'd want to develop a new browser from scratch, it would be a lot easier for me to code it, and for users to use it, as long as it sticks to the standards, which means that competition is open for all. Even though I try to enlighten all IE users I meet, and try to get them to switch to a superior browser, the fact that IE users are out there is fine with me, as long as their mass doesn't squash any alternatives. So, now that the browser wars are waging again, we only have to start the 'war' on Office-like-products (by getting OpenDocument accepted, or at the very least all important standards opened), in order to give alternative software suites a fair fighting chance to compete on functional grounds, instead of the same old "oh, but everybody else is using MS Office, so I can't switch even if I wanted to". After that is accomplished, getting people to switch, or at least try alternative operating systems would be a breeze.
TrueCrypt also supports 'plausible deniabilty'
on
TrueCrypt 4.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I just wanted to point out that TrueCrypt differs from most other disk-encryption-tools mentioned by my fellow posters in that it also supports 'hidden volumes', which allows a user (for example if forced to give out a password, since the existence of an encrypted volume seems suspicious) to give out a password, which simply shows a 'bogus' partition - but there is no way to prove that the password that was provided is not the 'important' one, or for that matter it's impossible to prove that such a hidden volume even exists.
"ignorance is bliss" is so pre-enlightment
on
Life with a Lethal Gene
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a saying in spanish regarding unfaithfulness: "Lo que los ojos no ven, el corazon no siente", meaning that if you don't see/know it (the fact that your partner is being unfaithful), your heart wont feel it, so i guess it's basically like "ignorance is bliss", but more to-the-point.
I do understand why people would like to live in a state of ignorance regarding 'the truth', regarding their own fate - i think it's very similar to taking drugs. Sure, you're happy and all, and that's nice, but it's not 'real' happiness. As soon as you know that you may be fooling yourself, it might still work, but you'd still feel as if you'd be missing something.
I think that this is because society simply isn't ready yet for sincerity: when someone is unfaithful, you're supposed to go crazy, instead of talk about it and look into yourself whether you can live with that. If you know you're going to die in a nasty way in a couple of years (like in the FA), society rewards you if you don't tell anyone (insurance policies, dating, etc.). If you know you don't know something when somebody ask you something, most people respect you MORE if you just talk your way out of it instead of actually admitting that you don't know. All this, even though most people I know, once you confront them wit this, will readily admit that it doesn't make any sense, and that our supposedly enlightened society should be open about stuff like that, and actually value sincerity and openness instead of the more globally ineffective hypocrisy that most people seem to be living. Why is that?
I'm always wondering why Linksys, or their OEMs, or anybody, don't sell a 'naked' router, or 'micro PC' that runs linux, and by default doesn't do much more. Developing and maintaining the firmware must cost them money, and they don't earn any money by including nagware (like Dell does), so these naked, no-firmware micro PCs should actually be cheaper than the real ones. But all i can find online which comes close to "a Linksys router without an OS, so go ahead and hack the hell out of it" would be stuff like the Gumstix or Soekris devices, which all seem way more expensive than e.g. a basic, re-flashable Linksys router.
Does anybody know of someone selling a Linksys-router-class micro-PC, that easily exposes stuff like the internal serial port, has at least one USB port, and a Wifi-module plugged in? Imagine what a standard hackable platform like that could end up doing, if it were even cheaper than the "branded" devices, and and a guarantee that alternative firmwares like like OpenWRT ran on it!
I especially don't understand why Linksys for example has header-pins for a fullblown serial port on their boards, but don't include an external DB9 connector, at least on their 'hackable' -L model.
one gadget that might come in handy is a plain old GSM cellphone that works on the frequencies used in your destination country/continent (or take a triband phone with you, just to be sure). In emergencies, paying the often exaggerated raoming-fees might be acceptable, but best of all, the GSM standard dictates that all cellphones must be allowed to make an emergency-call (usually by dialling 112, but 911 seems to work in some countries, too) no matter which network in which country your SIM card belongs to - it even works if the phone doesn't even have a SIM-chip in it.
I think they should offer a way that people can opt-in to see ads. I, for one, would be more than willing to donate some eyeball-time of mine for the cause. I think i saw some projects that did something similiar, but I'd prefer it if it were official.
I read somewhere (can't find it now) that people once experimented with automating trains. After a while it showed that even in trains the passengers hated the idea of not having a 'pilot', so nowadays most trainconducters are basically just sitting there for the comfort of the passengers, and not really doing anything strictly necessary.
A couple of days ago, I watched 'Lost' online from ABC's website, and was impressed.
It had a nice interface, acceptable quality (i'm no videophile), and was simply convenient. What i found most impressing, though, were the commercials: there were 3 blocks of interactive, flash-based commercials, that you had to watch for at least 20 seconds (or so). After the counter came down to 0 seconds, you could continue with what you where watching, even if the commercial wasn't over yet. I dislike ads as much as the next slashdotter, but the networks have to make some money somehow, so i accept them as a necessary evil. The nice thing about these ads was that some (Toyota Yaris) were very interactive and well-made, using the new medium as it should be - I even caught myself spending MORE than the the required minimum amount of time playing around with these commercials. On the other hand, some ads (Advil) were 'old school', i.e.: just a normal little video-sequence, and I immediately clicked on 'continue' as soon as i could.
So, my point is: This really worked for me (video-on-demand, nice interface, hassle-free) and for ABC (I actually remember the products they advertised during the show, because they were 'immersive'), so i am convinced that this is the future of television - it's a win-win situation.
i saw the movie, and kind of liked it, even though i think i didn't really learn anything new (most information can be taken from +5 slashdot posts over the last year or so). I highly recommend taking people that are maybe not very interested in the whole topic to see this movie though. It can really be quite a shocker for people that don't read the science part of the newspaper everyday.
Apart from that, i really loed the video taken from the galileo spacecraft where you can see earth rotating in space, and looked it up on the net, for your convenience:
i guess i'm not the only one who is a bot dissapointed by these spy gadgets, since they all seem a bit wannabe-james-bond.
anybody know of real high-tech (or highly sneaky) gadgets that real spies use or used?
one of my favourites was the Great Seal Bug
Opera's mouse gestures must get a whole new 'feeling' with the wiimote, which must feel very nice.br
Speaking of which - i'd love to be connect a wiimote-like device to my PC, and use it e.g. for firefox' mouse gestures. Anybody know of a device like that? can't be taht hard to build, taking into account that really small accelorometers seem to become really affordable nowadays...
Slashdot Mirror
Without actually looking it up, I'd guess this feature is useful for example if you develop XUL-based applications and the like. You could then link to the XUL application on your website, and IE (if you're using it to browse the site) would open the application in FF.
For a more neutral, exhaustive and more well-respected list of "Wonderful Places/Things":
UNESCO's list of World Heritages
IIRC, Sunbird und Google Calendar support open standards, and CPAN is full of Palm-related modules, so i'd guess that that shouldn't really be that hard to do.
Star Control 4 should really get a prize for being the most disappointing sequel/continuation ever made. Additionally, because it did so poorly, the real developers never got a chance to make a worthy successor to the incredible game that Star Control 2 was. If you haven played it yet, and dont mind the only slightly outdated graphics, SC2 was released under the name The Ur-Quan Masters under the GPL.
This would be great if Apple includes something along the lines of Google Gears on it, and makes that easy to develop for. It ould be the best of both worlds: easy development (but with almost no limit on how complex the App would be), and a nice online/offline compromise.
Just a little question i've been asking myself for ages: Why do current theories postulate the the universe will NOT contract back to a singularity after a (long) while? I thought i kind of understood the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory that used to popular, since gravity works at infinite distances, and should thus, ever so slowly, decelerate the expansion of the universe, or at least the fact that galaxies are traveling away from each other. AFAIU (understand), the constant acceleration of things in the universe (in part by the expansion of the universe) away from each other is powered by left-over energy from the Big Bang, which should be a finite amount of energy.
So why does the ever-so-soft tugging of inter-galaxy gravity, over an infinite amount of time, NOT lead to a Big Crunch? Any Astrophysicist car to enlighten me? I really want to understand this...
The killer game for the OLPC would be an open-sourced "The Incredible Machine" clone, i think. Whatever happened to that franchise, anyhow?One of the greatest non-violent games ever created, IMHO.
Something along the SimCity games would be cool, too, i guess.
Maybe the owners of those franchises (Dynamix [?] and Maxis) could even help out a bit, for PR reasons?
Link, please ;-)
In the (highly recommended) movie "The Prestige", one of the main characters tries to explain how (stage) magic works. His theory is basically that Humans know how mundane, boring, and in it's essence simple life and our existence is, but that we'd love it to not be that simple. Thus, there is a certain bias to look for - and accept - things that are 'magical', if only to make our brief stay in this universe appear a bit more meaningful. I always thought that this was a great explanation for conspiracies and religion, too.
This isn't about blame. It's about how to avoid, or at least minimize the risk of, something like this happening again. Just because you managed to stand up for yourself doesn't mean that others can. So the problem is what to do about these people that for one reason or another can't stand up for themselves. Should we lock them all up? Should we ignore them? Should we keep on picking on them?
I agree that the direct blame for pulling the trigger is his (duh!), but leaving it at that that doesn't really help anybody. Some societies are a great fertile ground for people that pull triggers to grow on, so maybe we should see whether there's anything we can do about that.
I, for one, would not want the browser wars to be over - as someone else pointed out, the fact that there's a "war" going on is a good thing, since that means that web developers, frameworks and companies all have to think of the other browsers, instead of only IE, as they did ca. 5 years ago. This, in turn, means that they will try to stick to the official standards (as much as they can), which in turn means that if I'd want to develop a new browser from scratch, it would be a lot easier for me to code it, and for users to use it, as long as it sticks to the standards, which means that competition is open for all. Even though I try to enlighten all IE users I meet, and try to get them to switch to a superior browser, the fact that IE users are out there is fine with me, as long as their mass doesn't squash any alternatives. So, now that the browser wars are waging again, we only have to start the 'war' on Office-like-products (by getting OpenDocument accepted, or at the very least all important standards opened), in order to give alternative software suites a fair fighting chance to compete on functional grounds, instead of the same old "oh, but everybody else is using MS Office, so I can't switch even if I wanted to". After that is accomplished, getting people to switch, or at least try alternative operating systems would be a breeze.
I just wanted to point out that TrueCrypt differs from most other disk-encryption-tools mentioned by my fellow posters in that it also supports 'hidden volumes', which allows a user (for example if forced to give out a password, since the existence of an encrypted volume seems suspicious) to give out a password, which simply shows a 'bogus' partition - but there is no way to prove that the password that was provided is not the 'important' one, or for that matter it's impossible to prove that such a hidden volume even exists.
There's a saying in spanish regarding unfaithfulness: "Lo que los ojos no ven, el corazon no siente", meaning that if you don't see/know it (the fact that your partner is being unfaithful), your heart wont feel it, so i guess it's basically like "ignorance is bliss", but more to-the-point.
I do understand why people would like to live in a state of ignorance regarding 'the truth', regarding their own fate - i think it's very similar to taking drugs. Sure, you're happy and all, and that's nice, but it's not 'real' happiness. As soon as you know that you may be fooling yourself, it might still work, but you'd still feel as if you'd be missing something.
I think that this is because society simply isn't ready yet for sincerity: when someone is unfaithful, you're supposed to go crazy, instead of talk about it and look into yourself whether you can live with that. If you know you're going to die in a nasty way in a couple of years (like in the FA), society rewards you if you don't tell anyone (insurance policies, dating, etc.). If you know you don't know something when somebody ask you something, most people respect you MORE if you just talk your way out of it instead of actually admitting that you don't know. All this, even though most people I know, once you confront them wit this, will readily admit that it doesn't make any sense, and that our supposedly enlightened society should be open about stuff like that, and actually value sincerity and openness instead of the more globally ineffective hypocrisy that most people seem to be living. Why is that?
I'm always wondering why Linksys, or their OEMs, or anybody, don't sell a 'naked' router, or 'micro PC' that runs linux, and by default doesn't do much more. Developing and maintaining the firmware must cost them money, and they don't earn any money by including nagware (like Dell does), so these naked, no-firmware micro PCs should actually be cheaper than the real ones. But all i can find online which comes close to "a Linksys router without an OS, so go ahead and hack the hell out of it" would be stuff like the Gumstix or Soekris devices, which all seem way more expensive than e.g. a basic, re-flashable Linksys router.
Does anybody know of someone selling a Linksys-router-class micro-PC, that easily exposes stuff like the internal serial port, has at least one USB port, and a Wifi-module plugged in? Imagine what a standard hackable platform like that could end up doing, if it were even cheaper than the "branded" devices, and and a guarantee that alternative firmwares like like OpenWRT ran on it!
I especially don't understand why Linksys for example has header-pins for a fullblown serial port on their boards, but don't include an external DB9 connector, at least on their 'hackable' -L model.
one gadget that might come in handy is a plain old GSM cellphone that works on the frequencies used in your destination country/continent (or take a triband phone with you, just to be sure). In emergencies, paying the often exaggerated raoming-fees might be acceptable, but best of all, the GSM standard dictates that all cellphones must be allowed to make an emergency-call (usually by dialling 112, but 911 seems to work in some countries, too) no matter which network in which country your SIM card belongs to - it even works if the phone doesn't even have a SIM-chip in it.
I think they should offer a way that people can opt-in to see ads. I, for one, would be more than willing to donate some eyeball-time of mine for the cause. I think i saw some projects that did something similiar, but I'd prefer it if it were official.
Just wanted to point out that Nick Ing-Simmons died a while ago, which might be a cause of Perl/Tk's slow progress.
Here you go
I read somewhere (can't find it now) that people once experimented with automating trains. After a while it showed that even in trains the passengers hated the idea of not having a 'pilot', so nowadays most trainconducters are basically just sitting there for the comfort of the passengers, and not really doing anything strictly necessary.
A couple of days ago, I watched 'Lost' online from ABC's website, and was impressed.
It had a nice interface, acceptable quality (i'm no videophile), and was simply convenient. What i found most impressing, though, were the commercials: there were 3 blocks of interactive, flash-based commercials, that you had to watch for at least 20 seconds (or so). After the counter came down to 0 seconds, you could continue with what you where watching, even if the commercial wasn't over yet. I dislike ads as much as the next slashdotter, but the networks have to make some money somehow, so i accept them as a necessary evil. The nice thing about these ads was that some (Toyota Yaris) were very interactive and well-made, using the new medium as it should be - I even caught myself spending MORE than the the required minimum amount of time playing around with these commercials. On the other hand, some ads (Advil) were 'old school', i.e.: just a normal little video-sequence, and I immediately clicked on 'continue' as soon as i could.
So, my point is: This really worked for me (video-on-demand, nice interface, hassle-free) and for ABC (I actually remember the products they advertised during the show, because they were 'immersive'), so i am convinced that this is the future of television - it's a win-win situation.
Apart from that, i really loed the video taken from the galileo spacecraft where you can see earth rotating in space, and looked it up on the net, for your convenience:
Beneath a Steel Sky was excellent - and is available as freeware and runs perfectly under ScummVM.
i'm surprised nobody linked to the fake iPhone ads some people made.
i guess i'm not the only one who is a bot dissapointed by these spy gadgets, since they all seem a bit wannabe-james-bond.
anybody know of real high-tech (or highly sneaky) gadgets that real spies use or used?
one of my favourites was the Great Seal Bug
Opera's mouse gestures must get a whole new 'feeling' with the wiimote, which must feel very nice.br Speaking of which - i'd love to be connect a wiimote-like device to my PC, and use it e.g. for firefox' mouse gestures. Anybody know of a device like that? can't be taht hard to build, taking into account that really small accelorometers seem to become really affordable nowadays...