well put!
i'd just like to add that i once had a homework in a class about "formlization of knowledge" where the professor asked us to 'translate' the german laws controlling heritage into formal language. we were astounded by the gaping hole we found inside the formalization - when we brought this up, he said:
"see? those holes are were humanity lies", referring to the fact that all laws must be subject to interpretation, and must be ambigous - in part, that's what we have judges for: to judge in the not-so-obvious cases what is 'right', under the circumstances.
since most of the new features of vista seem to be either eye-candy, or not THAT difficult to recreate, does anybody know whether there's any way to make XP 'feel like' vista? not only backgrounds and color schemes, but stuff like the panels and all that? some explorer.exe replacement?
did i miss something, or wasn't WPA or WPA2 'secure enough'? i know it's relatively easy to hack wep, but AFAIK, WPA with a good password hasn't been hacked yet? so why do stories about how to block wifi signals at significant cost always pop up now and then?
what i like about OSS and Gnu/Linus is choice and possibilities. I always tell people that linux can run on stuff like an iPod up to most of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and i love that. what does suck is that some aspects of desktop linux make it harder for someone to say "yea, i love open source and all that, but i'd really like to be able to watch DRM-crippled content without jumping through hoops, or see nootices that it is illegal to watch dvds". sure, i think there are some distros with an mp3 and dvd license, but why cant i just install debian, drop the necessary codecs in something liche/usr/local/codecs, and all my apps work, a bit like directshow filters (i think?). it's my choice whether i i drop deCSS there, or some licensed commercial codec. (i'm running suse 10 on my laptop, and mplayer plays.wmvs fine, but totem and noatun still chockes on.mp3s, and because i installed 3rd party rpms, suse's whole update-thing is utterly confused)
the specific complain about iPods is nonsense, or will at least soon be a thing of the past. with DBUS it seems that there's going to be a common messaging bus for linux desktops now, and i bet that the applications will come and improve, and include ipods or whatever media player is hip now. it's just that the infrastructure is so twisted.
same thing with wifi and drivers in general: sure, ndiswrapper is an ugly hack, but why can't i just dump binary drivers in/usr/drivers/non-free and open source drivers in/usr/drivers/free , and be done with it?
i am really sorry to hear this - apart from the fact that 100$ had a nice symbolic ring to it, i would've loved if a back-to-basics PC like the original one would gain more popularity - the lines between 'necessary' and 'luxury' are way to blurred noawadays, anyhow. didn't the originnal design have a USB port? so why do they have to include a webcam? sure - i guess the CMOS itself costs near to nothing, and will be hooked up to the usb bus internally anyhow, but it's still not necessaary, even though it might be a good deal.
anybody know where i can buy a basic mobile computer nowadays? something that takes advantage of the advances of some technologies (batteries, flash storage), but compromises for 'good enough' in other parts ( a pentium II runs firefox and older versions of office fine enough), and comes in a toshiba libretto-style formfactor?
i also only use the DECIMAL datatype in my databases, so i can safely ignore all of this, yet, if i remember correctly, this whole float-thing exists because it is more efficient and machine-friendly. Does anybody have any performance comparisons on large datasets comparing the various number-types, not only in the context of databases? aren't floats supposed to be very FPU-friendly? how are e.g. DECIMALs calculated? would it be better to store dinacial numbers as INT[decimalpoint]INT?
I'll stick to firefox anyhow, because of its cross-platformy-ness and the extensions, but i feel your pain of having to reinstall extensions that i (and sometime only me) find fundamental - there should really be an install-option that offers different widely used install-profiles, so that if i select e.g. "add standard webdeveloper extensions" it downloads and installs the basics automatically. and an option to point the installer to a custom installation-profile. that would really rock, IMHO.
most EU countries offer RFID passports too, nowadays - yet i hace yet to hear somebody being worried about that particular 'danger', since europeans actually seem to be welcomed in a lot of countries (i heard somewhere that a EU passport costs a lot more than a USA passport on the black market, partly because of this). my question is: why is there a relativly rampant anti-americanism everywhere? it can't be jealousy, since the EU is as well off or better off than the USA, and 'freedom' and 'liberty' still seem to have actual meanings outside of the US. so could somebody please explain to me how the US goverment OFFICIALLY justifies this glaringly bad work of their "PR department"? wouldn't simply being a BIT nicer with everybody else have a better ROI for american citizens than this never-ending fear-monging, and new (dis/u)topian, billion-dollar anti-terror gadgests?
sorry if that came out a bot trollish, but i really wonder why the american public doesn't realize how absurd it is to be so worried that people abroad might figure out that your american..
i think the problem isn't that people divulge personal information online, without thinking abou the consequences. The problem is that society still isn't liberal enough to cope with this wealth of information. Why should anybody care what nosense i said or did when i was 15 years old? does the fact that somebody went binge-drinking in his college years, and drank body-shots of some friend of his really make him a 'worse human being'? show me a person nowadays who actually believes that absolutly anybody who smoked a bit of pot in his life is a drug addict, and that that person could under no circumstances be a good employee.
"information wants to be free", and thus on the long run, noone can hide all stupid/nasty/childish things they ever did. the point is that people shouldn't judge people based on that - if anybody 'investigated' me online, they'd see some incredibly stupid perl-related questions i asked years ago - but nobody in their right mind would conclude that, just because of that (!), i know nothing about perl. and sooner or later, i'd bet that this mentality will catch on in the rest of the population, because of the sheer wealth of information available to anyone about anyone these days.
he barcode-scanner-flas-thingy didn't work for me.
anybody know of any good and free programs that can scan barcodes from a webcam? in the worst case from a snapshot taken from a webcam? the real scanners are just too expensive, if webcams could do the same.
you should give other gecko-based browsers like K-Meleon a try on lower-end windows PCs. I think K-Meleon is snappier than Firefox because it leaves out the whole XUL layer, and uses native windows widgets, or something like that. I even deployed it on Pentium II machines.
I'm so sick and tired of that argument, every time it pops up in electric car or hydrogen economy related articles.
as i see it, we should still be changing to electric cars or hydrogen based ones, even if it produces more nasty stuff at the beginning, if you take the power plants into consideration (which is not even proven at this point, because of efficancy differences)
the really important thing is to change the energy-transmitting infrastructure - by changing it from fossil fuels to hydrogen or electricity, we create another level of abstraction (to use programmer's speak), and we can tackle the other parts later (someday, in spite of the old joke that fusion is always only a couple of years away, it will arrive). there are zillions of ways to produce electricity, but only one way to "produce" normal gasoline (i love the idea of bio-petrol, but i think it's more of a temporary crutch than a real solution). with electric or hydrogen based cars, we'd open the energy producing market to a broader competition, so to speak.
it's kind of like developing cross-platform applications. it allows you to switch the underlying layers depending on your needs.
but right now, we have this massive monolithic problem that the whole infrastructure, from the moment the oil is pumped out, upto the moment the gas explodes in your cylinders, is extremly unflexibly based on fossil fuels. so the only reasonable way out of this is the good old 'divide & conquer', IMHO.
i just finished fighting with my PCMCIA WiFi card and ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant, becasue they only choose to work when they feel like it - everything from Segmentation Faults to perfected working happens from time to time - I guess it's because of the voodoo invloved in making a windows driver run on linux, so i guess i shouldnt complain. but it still begs the question why there's no "ndiswrapper for *BSD drivers", or something along those lines. AFAIK, windows drivers have to have a rather rigid interface (NDIS?), and this might not be the case for the BSDs, but i'd still guess that it should be easier to build a wrapper for other open-source drivers than for windows drivers?
while i agree with the other people opinion that this lack of gods is mainly due to better team-managment and the fact that no single person plays that big a part in the development of a game as before, i am kind of surprised that the team-leaders responsible for the overall project don't get more credit - for movies, everybody markets the director or the producer of the movie, because that info gives you a rough idea what style or quality that movie will have - but i have rarely seen this in games (Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright and Ron Gilbert [what happened to him, anyhow?] come to my mind).
but which single person was the 'director' or driving force of e.g. Halo? Command & Conquer? Grim Fandango? Why do those people not get more credit?
i just read about CORE FORCE in some other discussion, and this might be what you are looking for.
From their site:
CORE FORCE provides inbound and outbound stateful packet filtering for TCP/IP protocols using a Windows port of OpenBSD's PF firewall, granular file system and registry access control and programs' integrity validation. These capabilities can be configured and enforced system-wide or on a per-application basis for specific programs such as email readers, Web browsers, media players, messaging software, etc.
I guess i am not the only one here that feels a certain 'bond' to my primary PCs, and i really try to give them somthing useful (routing, fileserving, whatever) to do after i can't use them as my primary workstations anymore. Nonsense, if you think about it, but i still do it.
What i found most interesting about this 'bonding' was to figure out exactly what i was bonding to: if i replace a video-card, some RAM or even the CPU, i still 'feel' as if it's the same machine, even though it obviously isn't. I guess i could change any component, one after the other, and still feel that bond. Thus,, this bonding mechanism (for me, at least), works on a more conceptual level.
Isn't this the same way we bond to other living beings? Like a long-lost friend that might be about 99% different than the last time we saw him, yet still consider him our friend?
i fail to see why computer theft is still an issue - even i implemented a relativly simple, yet, as far as i can see, 'secure enough' system for these situations:
all 'interesting' files are inside AES256 encrypted container-files wich are mounted via loop-devices.
if, for some reason, a server or machine reboots, it asks the next higher server for the password it needs to decrypt itself via an encrypted network connection. if a machine is reported as stolen, the server that has the task of sending the passwords gets advised of this, and simply wont send the corresponding password anymore. the peak of this pyramid of trusted machines is an off-site server far, far away. thus, if the hierarchy is broken (e.g. by computer theft) anywhere along the way, it's a matter of seconds to render all information contained on the stolen machine completly useless.
if i came up with this, surely the admins of REALLY important data can?
Actually, i think that it is - most people i'd consider 'intelligent' (whatever the definition of that word is) have no propblem joking about themselves, or the group they identify with. i believe it has something to do with abstracting oneself from oneself. most 'dumb' people really seem to think that they look great when they look at themselves ini the mirror, and will just disregard any criticism, wheras 'smart' people seem to be more tolerant to critique.
i personally like mark twain's quote along the lines of:
"whoever can't laugh about himself, is not taking life seriously enough"
i'm frankly a bit surprised that so many people don't know what you're talking about - i know it very well, and it even affects my monitors.i actually like it -you get to see how long the cell-tower to phone negotiating takes, since it starts happening a couple of seconds before the phone actually rings or receives a SMS.
the solution, i guess, is simply to use more expensive shielded speakers, since that's what faraday cages do.
yea, i'm living in costa rica right now, and that part of the CAFTA (called 'TLC' here) is really scary, amongst many, many other things.
but the impressive part that Richard Stallman was here on a conference about 3 years ago, and predicted EXACTLY that, and spelled out all the dangers that this implies for the kind of new, yet supposedly booming software-industry here. this is gonna suck.
i simply took an old jansport backpack, duct-taped some packing foam together so that my laptop fits nicely into it, put some (replaceable) bubblewrap around the edges for added protection, and put that into the backpack. i could swear that my laptop is better schock-protected that way, and noone would guess what's in that bag. added benefit is that i can put the laptop inside the bag and get it out than any other 'real' laptop bag i've seen, and people actually think this solution is 'cooler' and more professional when i take out my laptop at meetings,because they instantly understand that it actually makes sense.
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well put!
i'd just like to add that i once had a homework in a class about "formlization of knowledge" where the professor asked us to 'translate' the german laws controlling heritage into formal language. we were astounded by the gaping hole we found inside the formalization - when we brought this up, he said:
"see? those holes are were humanity lies", referring to the fact that all laws must be subject to interpretation, and must be ambigous - in part, that's what we have judges for: to judge in the not-so-obvious cases what is 'right', under the circumstances.
since most of the new features of vista seem to be either eye-candy, or not THAT difficult to recreate, does anybody know whether there's any way to make XP 'feel like' vista? not only backgrounds and color schemes, but stuff like the panels and all that? some explorer.exe replacement?
did i miss something, or wasn't WPA or WPA2 'secure enough'? i know it's relatively easy to hack wep, but AFAIK, WPA with a good password hasn't been hacked yet? so why do stories about how to block wifi signals at significant cost always pop up now and then?
what i like about OSS and Gnu/Linus is choice and possibilities. I always tell people that linux can run on stuff like an iPod up to most of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and i love that. what does suck is that some aspects of desktop linux make it harder for someone to say "yea, i love open source and all that, but i'd really like to be able to watch DRM-crippled content without jumping through hoops, or see nootices that it is illegal to watch dvds". sure, i think there are some distros with an mp3 and dvd license, but why cant i just install debian, drop the necessary codecs in something liche /usr/local/codecs, and all my apps work, a bit like directshow filters (i think?). it's my choice whether i i drop deCSS there, or some licensed commercial codec. (i'm running suse 10 on my laptop, and mplayer plays .wmvs fine, but totem and noatun still chockes on .mp3s, and because i installed 3rd party rpms, suse's whole update-thing is utterly confused) /usr/drivers/non-free and open source drivers in /usr/drivers/free , and be done with it?
the specific complain about iPods is nonsense, or will at least soon be a thing of the past. with DBUS it seems that there's going to be a common messaging bus for linux desktops now, and i bet that the applications will come and improve, and include ipods or whatever media player is hip now. it's just that the infrastructure is so twisted.
same thing with wifi and drivers in general: sure, ndiswrapper is an ugly hack, but why can't i just dump binary drivers in
i am really sorry to hear this - apart from the fact that 100$ had a nice symbolic ring to it, i would've loved if a back-to-basics PC like the original one would gain more popularity - the lines between 'necessary' and 'luxury' are way to blurred noawadays, anyhow. didn't the originnal design have a USB port? so why do they have to include a webcam? sure - i guess the CMOS itself costs near to nothing, and will be hooked up to the usb bus internally anyhow, but it's still not necessaary, even though it might be a good deal.
anybody know where i can buy a basic mobile computer nowadays? something that takes advantage of the advances of some technologies (batteries, flash storage), but compromises for 'good enough' in other parts ( a pentium II runs firefox and older versions of office fine enough), and comes in a toshiba libretto-style formfactor?
i also only use the DECIMAL datatype in my databases, so i can safely ignore all of this, yet, if i remember correctly, this whole float-thing exists because it is more efficient and machine-friendly. Does anybody have any performance comparisons on large datasets comparing the various number-types, not only in the context of databases? aren't floats supposed to be very FPU-friendly? how are e.g. DECIMALs calculated? would it be better to store dinacial numbers as INT[decimalpoint]INT?
I'll stick to firefox anyhow, because of its cross-platformy-ness and the extensions, but i feel your pain of having to reinstall extensions that i (and sometime only me) find fundamental - there should really be an install-option that offers different widely used install-profiles, so that if i select e.g. "add standard webdeveloper extensions" it downloads and installs the basics automatically. and an option to point the installer to a custom installation-profile. that would really rock, IMHO.
most EU countries offer RFID passports too, nowadays - yet i hace yet to hear somebody being worried about that particular 'danger', since europeans actually seem to be welcomed in a lot of countries (i heard somewhere that a EU passport costs a lot more than a USA passport on the black market, partly because of this). my question is: why is there a relativly rampant anti-americanism everywhere? it can't be jealousy, since the EU is as well off or better off than the USA, and 'freedom' and 'liberty' still seem to have actual meanings outside of the US. so could somebody please explain to me how the US goverment OFFICIALLY justifies this glaringly bad work of their "PR department"? wouldn't simply being a BIT nicer with everybody else have a better ROI for american citizens than this never-ending fear-monging, and new (dis/u)topian, billion-dollar anti-terror gadgests?
sorry if that came out a bot trollish, but i really wonder why the american public doesn't realize how absurd it is to be so worried that people abroad might figure out that your american..
i think the problem isn't that people divulge personal information online, without thinking abou the consequences. The problem is that society still isn't liberal enough to cope with this wealth of information. Why should anybody care what nosense i said or did when i was 15 years old? does the fact that somebody went binge-drinking in his college years, and drank body-shots of some friend of his really make him a 'worse human being'? show me a person nowadays who actually believes that absolutly anybody who smoked a bit of pot in his life is a drug addict, and that that person could under no circumstances be a good employee.
"information wants to be free", and thus on the long run, noone can hide all stupid/nasty/childish things they ever did. the point is that people shouldn't judge people based on that - if anybody 'investigated' me online, they'd see some incredibly stupid perl-related questions i asked years ago - but nobody in their right mind would conclude that, just because of that (!), i know nothing about perl. and sooner or later, i'd bet that this mentality will catch on in the rest of the population, because of the sheer wealth of information available to anyone about anyone these days.
he barcode-scanner-flas-thingy didn't work for me.
anybody know of any good and free programs that can scan barcodes from a webcam? in the worst case from a snapshot taken from a webcam? the real scanners are just too expensive, if webcams could do the same.
as almost always, CPAN is your friend in all things perl-related.
aside from that, i really don't understand why you'd use PHP if you're familiar enough with perl to use it.
You should have used NetBSD for that!
you should give other gecko-based browsers like K-Meleon a try on lower-end windows PCs. I think K-Meleon is snappier than Firefox because it leaves out the whole XUL layer, and uses native windows widgets, or something like that. I even deployed it on Pentium II machines.
yes.
I'm so sick and tired of that argument, every time it pops up in electric car or hydrogen economy related articles.
as i see it, we should still be changing to electric cars or hydrogen based ones, even if it produces more nasty stuff at the beginning, if you take the power plants into consideration (which is not even proven at this point, because of efficancy differences)
the really important thing is to change the energy-transmitting infrastructure - by changing it from fossil fuels to hydrogen or electricity, we create another level of abstraction (to use programmer's speak), and we can tackle the other parts later (someday, in spite of the old joke that fusion is always only a couple of years away, it will arrive). there are zillions of ways to produce electricity, but only one way to "produce" normal gasoline (i love the idea of bio-petrol, but i think it's more of a temporary crutch than a real solution). with electric or hydrogen based cars, we'd open the energy producing market to a broader competition, so to speak.
it's kind of like developing cross-platform applications. it allows you to switch the underlying layers depending on your needs.
but right now, we have this massive monolithic problem that the whole infrastructure, from the moment the oil is pumped out, upto the moment the gas explodes in your cylinders, is extremly unflexibly based on fossil fuels. so the only reasonable way out of this is the good old 'divide & conquer', IMHO.
i just finished fighting with my PCMCIA WiFi card and ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant, becasue they only choose to work when they feel like it - everything from Segmentation Faults to perfected working happens from time to time - I guess it's because of the voodoo invloved in making a windows driver run on linux, so i guess i shouldnt complain. but it still begs the question why there's no "ndiswrapper for *BSD drivers", or something along those lines. AFAIK, windows drivers have to have a rather rigid interface (NDIS?), and this might not be the case for the BSDs, but i'd still guess that it should be easier to build a wrapper for other open-source drivers than for windows drivers?
while i agree with the other people opinion that this lack of gods is mainly due to better team-managment and the fact that no single person plays that big a part in the development of a game as before, i am kind of surprised that the team-leaders responsible for the overall project don't get more credit - for movies, everybody markets the director or the producer of the movie, because that info gives you a rough idea what style or quality that movie will have - but i have rarely seen this in games (Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright and Ron Gilbert [what happened to him, anyhow?] come to my mind).
but which single person was the 'director' or driving force of e.g. Halo? Command & Conquer? Grim Fandango? Why do those people not get more credit?
From their site:
I guess i am not the only one here that feels a certain 'bond' to my primary PCs, and i really try to give them somthing useful (routing, fileserving, whatever) to do after i can't use them as my primary workstations anymore. Nonsense, if you think about it, but i still do it.
What i found most interesting about this 'bonding' was to figure out exactly what i was bonding to: if i replace a video-card, some RAM or even the CPU, i still 'feel' as if it's the same machine, even though it obviously isn't. I guess i could change any component, one after the other, and still feel that bond. Thus,, this bonding mechanism (for me, at least), works on a more conceptual level.
Isn't this the same way we bond to other living beings? Like a long-lost friend that might be about 99% different than the last time we saw him, yet still consider him our friend?
i fail to see why computer theft is still an issue - even i implemented a relativly simple, yet, as far as i can see, 'secure enough' system for these situations:
all 'interesting' files are inside AES256 encrypted container-files wich are mounted via loop-devices.
if, for some reason, a server or machine reboots, it asks the next higher server for the password it needs to decrypt itself via an encrypted network connection. if a machine is reported as stolen, the server that has the task of sending the passwords gets advised of this, and simply wont send the corresponding password anymore. the peak of this pyramid of trusted machines is an off-site server far, far away. thus, if the hierarchy is broken (e.g. by computer theft) anywhere along the way, it's a matter of seconds to render all information contained on the stolen machine completly useless.
if i came up with this, surely the admins of REALLY important data can?
Actually, i think that it is - most people i'd consider 'intelligent' (whatever the definition of that word is) have no propblem joking about themselves, or the group they identify with. i believe it has something to do with abstracting oneself from oneself. most 'dumb' people really seem to think that they look great when they look at themselves ini the mirror, and will just disregard any criticism, wheras 'smart' people seem to be more tolerant to critique.
i personally like mark twain's quote along the lines of:
"whoever can't laugh about himself, is not taking life seriously enough"
i'm frankly a bit surprised that so many people don't know what you're talking about - i know it very well, and it even affects my monitors.i actually like it -you get to see how long the cell-tower to phone negotiating takes, since it starts happening a couple of seconds before the phone actually rings or receives a SMS.
the solution, i guess, is simply to use more expensive shielded speakers, since that's what faraday cages do.
yea, i'm living in costa rica right now, and that part of the CAFTA (called 'TLC' here) is really scary, amongst many, many other things.
but the impressive part that Richard Stallman was here on a conference about 3 years ago, and predicted EXACTLY that, and spelled out all the dangers that this implies for the kind of new, yet supposedly booming software-industry here. this is gonna suck.
shouldn't that be
SELECT * FROM books WHERE LENGTH( title ) > 142
or is that 'dot syntax' somehting i didn't know about?
i simply took an old jansport backpack, duct-taped some packing foam together so that my laptop fits nicely into it, put some (replaceable) bubblewrap around the edges for added protection, and put that into the backpack. i could swear that my laptop is better schock-protected that way, and noone would guess what's in that bag. added benefit is that i can put the laptop inside the bag and get it out than any other 'real' laptop bag i've seen, and people actually think this solution is 'cooler' and more professional when i take out my laptop at meetings,because they instantly understand that it actually makes sense.