Why the hell does anyone even use SourceForge anymore? Their tools suck, the site is beyond slow and plastered with ads, and you have to play download roulette with their crappy 90s-era mirroring system. Plus you get crazy decrees like this from whatever's going on at the top. It's not like there aren't alternatives these days. Google Code is awesome by comparison.
The problem with this is and always has been that there is a sizable group of people who are neither drooling simpletons nor "arch-tweakers." I don't want to "know about the GConf schemas," whatever the hell those are, or screw around in your version of RegEdit.
When I go into a preferences dialog, I'm not always just trying to flip a particular bit or turn something off. One of the things I like about GUIs, as opposed to doing everything from the command line, is that it is possible to (visually) explore the application and learn what it is capable of doing. When I run a new application I evaluate/learn it by opening windows and dialogs and looking to see what's inside them.
Most GNOME applications at this point in time are excellent, well-constructed and powerful pieces of software. But if you just poke around in them trying to figure them out, they seem like cheap mockups. It doesn't feel like good software. A preferences panel that doesn't let me explore feels incomplete and flimsy.
The bottom line is that in a GNOME app I usually do not come away having learned something new just by using it. I don't want to read the manual just to learn that a feature exists (although I will if I'm having trouble using it) or scroll through "keys" in GConf. It's the same nonsense that stuck me with flashing GIFS in Firefox for months after I started using it, until someone told me I could type in "about:config", scroll down to they key "image.animation_mode", and edit the value to "once". Or you can download an extension. Or you can edit ".mozilla/config/crazypeople/netscape_foobar32.js" or some other crazy file somewhere on my hard drive. It doesn't make any sense. I should be able to explore the majority of the useful functionality just by opening the application and clicking through it.
Which of the following best expresses the INTENT of the passage?
[ ] The update rollup will be released as Service Pack 5. [ ] The update rollup will not be released, but Service Pack 5 will. [X] Instead of Service Pack 5, the update rollup will be released, replacing Service Pack 5 as the final mainstream support package. [ ] Richard Nixon.
Seriously, the problem seems to be with the perceived risk. Star Trek has an established fan base, so even a very sucky new series is guaranteed at least SOME measure of support. People spending several tens of millions on a new show don't want to take risks on something unproven. It's the same reason Miss Congeniality 2 is playing down the street from me. Sequels are (perceived as) safer than originality.
The simplest argument I've ever heard against the shroud being real (i.e. an actual burial cloth) is the image of Jesus supposedly imprinted on it. The face/body have roughly the same dimensions as a normal human face, except for some blurring. However, this is NOT what you would expect on a piece of cloth wrapped around someone! If the "imprint" came from an actual body then when the shroud was removed the image, in particular the face, should be severely stretched horizontally. It should definitely NOT look like a photograph or a painting. This is because the cloth has to wrap around the face and actually cover the whole thing.
Take a soda bottle and a piece of paper. Cover the front half of the bottle (i.e. a 180-degree slice cylindrically). This represents the face. Mark the edges with pencil. Now hold up the paper and compare the "wrapped" length of the image (between the pencil marks) with the "visible" image (how wide the bottle looks when viewed straight-on). Photographs, paintings, and the image on the shroud have the "straight-on" dimensions. Regardless of how old the cloth is, the image is way too narrow. It's fake.
I opened it with the GIMP and poked around a bit. Go to the Color Balance and turn Cyan all the way down, Magenta and Yellow all the way up. The word "fake" appears three times on the right side, on the metal molding just above the floor.
Sorry for implying that you did; I missed your disclaimer the first time around. It's good that you want to understand. Although it does seem strange that you download term papers if you don't use them to cheat. If you're trying to learn from them, you may run into problems; student papers aren't the best source of concrete, well-reasoned information. It's much more effective to do it "the right way," even if it takes a few more hours at the library.
A degree can help you get a job even in a totally unrelated field.
So how does that make it OK to cheat? Because you might never see it again? So if I shoplifted a can of soup, but never consumed it, would that be OK?
Colleges, however, give you degrees, not just a sense of satisfaction.
This I really have to object to, because it's part of a larger movement I've run into which holds that any skill not immediately applicable is worthless academic "masturbation." I got a degree in physics, but took courses in film, literature and even classical Greek. And guess what. It made me a better physicist. It's all part of a giant body of human knowledge that can be applied in thousands of different ways, some of which you would never expect. The point of a liberal-arts education is that there ARE NO SUCH THINGS as unrelated fields.
And it isn't about self-satisfaction. That degree you spoke of is supposed to mean that you got through on the strength of your own abilities and insights. If you (hypothetically) cheat, it's worthless. Even if you get a job with it. Even if your employer doesn't care that you cribbed a few papers on The Great Gatsby in freshman English. It's hollow, because what the degree really says is that you have demonstrated, consistently, that you can think for yourself. And if you cheat, it's just a lie written on expensive paper.
I mean seriously, what the fuck? You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
You know all that droning on the professor did in class? All that stuff about "themes" and "tropes" and "methods of analysis?" Guess what. The professor has already given you the tools you need. Look at your notes, then look at the book. Then hit yourself in the head with either/both until you make the connection.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden. Oh, and at the end you'll actually understand the subject, more than "a tiny bit;" as in, you'll be able to apply the things you've learned elsewhere. I hear there are still some idealistic flower-people wandering about who think that's the whole point of college. Damn hippies.
Plagiarism is like cheating at solitaire. It's not even solitaire anymore. You might as well be throwing cards around randomly. Why the hell would you want to spend four years doing that?
Tip! Get the IP address of the ftp server before attempting the install! DNS isn't picked up on the SuSE boot/install CD.
Bizarrely, this isn't true. It turns out that if you type in an ordinary hostname (i.e. mirror.ac.uk) into the field where it says "IP Address (0.0.0.0)", it works just fine. I have no idea why they decided to label the field that way; it drove me nuts at first until I just said "what the hell" and typed in the hostname.
In the main version of Mozilla there's an option for animated gifs; you can set them not to loop, loop once, or however many times the image wants to. For some idiotic reason they took the option out of the preferences panel for FireWhatever. You can still get at it through about:config; set image.animation_mode to "once" or "none." Done.
What you call "fragmentation" is really competition, and I don't think it's a weakness. Let's consider the alternative:
Now, if all of geeks who hack it would get rid of their egos and put the best of breed into one utility instead of fighting over 50 or more different ones, then Microsoft would be out of business tomorrow.
Who chooses what's "best of breed"? Maybe one group has '-h' meaning "help", and one group has '-h' meaning 'hexadecimal input', and '-?' meaning help. Maybe there are legitimate disagreements about what the good features are, and not just "ego" problems. And the reason for the "various shells, editors, scripting languages" is because different people like different ones. The truely awful implementations, like the ones where '-h' means "skip every third line of input, except where the fifth word is 'flamingo'," die a natural, Darwinian death because people don't like them, and don't use them.
I appreciate uniformity and clarity, especially in things like Internet standards. In that case, the value in the standard is that without it, the different implementations would be worthless. But I don't see why it's reasonable to expect all commands across all Unixes, Linux, Solaris, or AIX, to function exactly the same.
People *can* create a standardized, windows-like experience from Linux/Unix components; hell, it's what Apple did with one of the BSDs. It's called a distribution. Any company or group is welcome to standardize the '-h' flag to mean 'help' across their distribution, but you certainly can't force me to adopt it.
A lot of Linux distributers are finding that people actually like lots of options. It's the reason SuSE comes with a slew of raster and vector graphics programs, and Windows comes with Microsoft Paint. Speaking of which, I really don't think the point is to kill off Microsoft. I use Linux because I enjoy it and find it useful. I don't care if Microsoft lives or dies, and I think it would be irresponsible to restrict healthy competition just to attack another software developer.
In fact, I've heard some math guys voice the opinion that releasing your source code is just a waste. It takes a significant time investment on your part to get it all packaged up, perhaps cleaning up the code some, and then to answer questions people have about it etc. And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released.
This makes absolute sense, if the goal in academia is the same as it is in corporate life: to make the most money and to be at the top of the food chain. On the one hand, people go into science claiming they're not in it for the money (and usually, there *isn't* that much money in it), but will hoard knowledge and backstab viciously to increase their position in the hierarchy. Why bother? They're just trading one type of greed for another.
I don't want to come off sounding completely naive, but I don't think cleaning code up, packaging it, sharing it with the world and answering questions is a waste of time. Similarly, it makes me sad that some professors view courses and lectures as an burdensome part of their job requirement.
No, all that matters is how many journals you published in. So while you were busy cleaning up your source code for release, fixing non-critical bugs and adding non-essential features, you could have been working on the next publication instead.
This really drives me nuts. It's the tragedy of the commons, on a smaller scale. Don't spend time teaching others when you could be advancing your own status. Chances are someone else will choose not to, and get ahead of you! Why help other people when you can put that energy into your own work? Hell, why do we even teach grad students? Before you know it, they have degrees and are competition! So be sure not to teach your Ph.D. students too much. And take their papers and put your name on them. And make sure your undergraduate lectures are boring as hell. That will slow them down.
As for the volume of papers, yes, "publish or perish." Yes, publication is incredibly important in science, and you'll fall flat on your ass if you don't make it a top priority. But the point is to share knowledge as well as get your name in print. Which means that the papers you write should actually SAY something. I think there's something seriously wrong with a system that rewards professorial diva-ism and 1-month publication intervals over sharing knowledge. Maybe this is why we now have hundreds of boring, poorly-written, dubiously constructed papers pouring out of every journal with a logo and a printing press. I'm not doing that much work right now and even so I can barely keep up with it. I don't even want to think about how many the peer reviewers chucked out before publication. Unless you actually have something interesting to say, it's just wasted time.
Hopefully, if the current trend keeps up, people will eventually stop evaluating by number of publications and start looking at their contents and impact. And who knows, maybe they'll even look at other things too.
I went to the site, clicked through a few pages, and started writing a comment about how I use Mozilla FireWhatever under SuSE, and that the silly tricks this webmaster uses don't affect me. Halfway through I went back to check on something, and noticed that the site actually DID have banner ads that Mozilla wasn't blocking. And when I blocked them, I got the "haha gotcha" message too.
The point is that I automatically ignore banner ads, as do a huge percentage of Internet users. It's even easier because Mozilla lets you turn off GIF animation, killing off the flashing crap. You can even choose which Flash things you want to see with the Flash Click to View plugin. If they want to enforce a no-block policy, that's their right. It just seems strange that they would invest so much effort in defending a semi-useless advertising technique. But hey, if someone's paying them for it, great. Like the site says, I don't want to pay money if I can pay with ad impressions. Especially if I don't notice them anyway.
Off topic, but there are some odd comments in the HTML source for their pages. Here's a quote:
We may not be happy with Opera software, but we also believe it wrong to hack someone elses software. If "window.opera" returns a true value and "Opera" is not part of the userAgent string reported by the browser, we know that Opera has be cracked.
Whaaa? I thought Opera gave you the option of changing the user agent through a GUI dialog. How is this "hacking?"
Somehow I have trouble trusting a security guide which lists "GRC.com Shields Up!!" as a network analysis tool. (p.26)
Seriously, though, there does seem to be a lot of good, if occasionally basic, advice here. I remember going through the guides the NSA compiled (warning: obnoxious legalese popup) ages ago, and I see some of the same advice here, e.g. remove the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems, etc.
How on earth is this "more convenient" than mozilla's built-in cookie management? Go to Tools->Options->Privacy in FireWhatever. Block them all or use "Enable cookies for current session only" (which seems to be what your script is trying to accomplish, throwing out bad cookies after a day or whenever the job runs) and add Slashdot, NYT, Yahoo! etc. to the convenient "exceptions" menu. Done.
Also, I'm not sure, because I don't write shell scripts often, but:
(1) it looks like this script is going to fill up ".mozilla/old" with copies of old, unfiltered cookie files. So there's a giant record of your browing history hanging around. That seems like a privacy (or embarassment) risk.
(2) if your script starts running at e.g. 11:59:59pm and takes too long, some of the `date` calls will produce different results, and you'll end up trying to operate on non-existant files. You might want to call date just once and store it in a variable or something.
I had all kinds of hardware problems; Red Hat 9 never did recognize my sound card either (Audigy 2), or my TV capture card (Winfast TV2000-something-or-other). I installed SuSE 9.0 a few months ago and it Just Worked out of the box; no hunting for vendor RPMs, no compiling, nothing. I never even saw any reference to "emu10k1" or whatever it was that Red Hat didn't like. It even installed the right driver for my "it's-software-RAID-but-we'll-sell-you-a-card-and- hope-you-think-it's-hardware-RAID" Adaptec 1200A IDE raid card, which Red Hat thought was two independent IDE controllers. (!) And my DVD+/-RW works perfectly as well.
SuSE has been amazing in this regard... if you haven't given it a try I strongly recommend it. 9.1 should be out in a few months; you can install it over the net (a while after store release) or buy the personal edition for cheap. It's literally the first version of linux that I've been able to use as my full-time desktop.
So apart from the plug I guess my point is that it depends on the distro. And consider what happens in the Windows world when you have unsupported hardware, or even vendor drivers that just suck. You're stuck. At least under Linux there might be enough people with the skills/environment to produce an open-source driver.
Never played Counter-Strike, but I did manage to get the original Half-Life working with WINE (in OpenGL mode, obviously). So there's hope.
That would have to get my vote for Slowest Loading Ever, but bear in mind the cassette-loading stuff is before my time. The worst part was that it spent 30 seconds each for the silly, non-skippable cutscenes, even those which just show a ship cruising towards a planet. And this is with a relatively new system, 512MB ram, 7200rpm hard drive, ATA100, etc. (and yes, DMA was on).
I actually enjoyed the game (please don't shoot me), but having to go through that everytime I "quick-loaded" finally wore out my patience. In one of the final battles with the souped-up Kai, I would load, fight for 5 seonds, get killed, load for 30 seconds, fight for 5 seconds , load... etc. I finally didn't even finish the game... it wasn't fun any more. Plus it didn't help that my character moved like a slug on downers and was trying to outrun BLACK HOLES, but that's another complaint. Maybe when I get a system with enough RAM to hold the entire game in memory (next decade) I'll try again.
So my advice would be: let people skip whatever non-essential bits they want, BEFORE you load them. And find a way to make "quick-load" on the current map significantly faster than archive-load of some other map.
This one doesn't make sense to me. Do the people who issue handicapped parking permits keep a list of the places people park? These conversations are often intensely personal; it's literally the only way some of these people can use a telephone. I agree completely with authentication, but keeping records seems intrusive and demeaning. And if they are kept, sooner or later the deaf will start getting "targeted" TTY advertisements...
"You recently mentioned to your mother that you're thinking of moving. Contact Local Realtors Inc for a free consulation!", etc.
To say nothing of the legal implications; a warrentless wiretap on thousands of American phones, always running, in plain-text, east-to-search format.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to what? If there is an export-control problem (not likely), do you really expect SourceForge's TOS to protect you?
Why the hell does anyone even use SourceForge anymore? Their tools suck, the site is beyond slow and plastered with ads, and you have to play download roulette with their crappy 90s-era mirroring system. Plus you get crazy decrees like this from whatever's going on at the top. It's not like there aren't alternatives these days. Google Code is awesome by comparison.
The problem with this is and always has been that there is a sizable group of people who are neither drooling simpletons nor "arch-tweakers." I don't want to "know about the GConf schemas," whatever the hell those are, or screw around in your version of RegEdit. When I go into a preferences dialog, I'm not always just trying to flip a particular bit or turn something off. One of the things I like about GUIs, as opposed to doing everything from the command line, is that it is possible to (visually) explore the application and learn what it is capable of doing. When I run a new application I evaluate/learn it by opening windows and dialogs and looking to see what's inside them.
Most GNOME applications at this point in time are excellent, well-constructed and powerful pieces of software. But if you just poke around in them trying to figure them out, they seem like cheap mockups. It doesn't feel like good software. A preferences panel that doesn't let me explore feels incomplete and flimsy. The bottom line is that in a GNOME app I usually do not come away having learned something new just by using it. I don't want to read the manual just to learn that a feature exists (although I will if I'm having trouble using it) or scroll through "keys" in GConf. It's the same nonsense that stuck me with flashing GIFS in Firefox for months after I started using it, until someone told me I could type in "about:config", scroll down to they key "image.animation_mode", and edit the value to "once". Or you can download an extension. Or you can edit ".mozilla/config/crazypeople/netscape_foobar32.js" or some other crazy file somewhere on my hard drive. It doesn't make any sense. I should be able to explore the majority of the useful functionality just by opening the application and clicking through it.
Which of the following best expresses the INTENT of the passage?
[ ] The update rollup will be released as Service Pack 5.
[ ] The update rollup will not be released, but Service Pack 5 will.
[X] Instead of Service Pack 5, the update rollup will be released, replacing Service Pack 5 as the final mainstream support package.
[ ] Richard Nixon.
It was called Firefly. They cancelled it.
Seriously, the problem seems to be with the perceived risk. Star Trek has an established fan base, so even a very sucky new series is guaranteed at least SOME measure of support. People spending several tens of millions on a new show don't want to take risks on something unproven. It's the same reason Miss Congeniality 2 is playing down the street from me. Sequels are (perceived as) safer than originality.
The simplest argument I've ever heard against the shroud being real (i.e. an actual burial cloth) is the image of Jesus supposedly imprinted on it. The face/body have roughly the same dimensions as a normal human face, except for some blurring. However, this is NOT what you would expect on a piece of cloth wrapped around someone! If the "imprint" came from an actual body then when the shroud was removed the image, in particular the face, should be severely stretched horizontally. It should definitely NOT look like a photograph or a painting. This is because the cloth has to wrap around the face and actually cover the whole thing.
Take a soda bottle and a piece of paper. Cover the front half of the bottle (i.e. a 180-degree slice cylindrically). This represents the face. Mark the edges with pencil. Now hold up the paper and compare the "wrapped" length of the image (between the pencil marks) with the "visible" image (how wide the bottle looks when viewed straight-on). Photographs, paintings, and the image on the shroud have the "straight-on" dimensions. Regardless of how old the cloth is, the image is way too narrow. It's fake.
That's a really great idea! I'll try this. In the meantime, here's a couple of things that have worked for me:
:)
1) DON'T POST ALL YOUR PASSWORDS ON SLASHDOT.
I agree, we should cut him into tiny pieces.
What's wrong with epoxy?
I opened it with the GIMP and poked around a bit. Go to the Color Balance and turn Cyan all the way down, Magenta and Yellow all the way up. The word "fake" appears three times on the right side, on the metal molding just above the floor.
A degree can help you get a job even in a totally unrelated field.
So how does that make it OK to cheat? Because you might never see it again? So if I shoplifted a can of soup, but never consumed it, would that be OK?
Colleges, however, give you degrees, not just a sense of satisfaction.
This I really have to object to, because it's part of a larger movement I've run into which holds that any skill not immediately applicable is worthless academic "masturbation." I got a degree in physics, but took courses in film, literature and even classical Greek. And guess what. It made me a better physicist. It's all part of a giant body of human knowledge that can be applied in thousands of different ways, some of which you would never expect. The point of a liberal-arts education is that there ARE NO SUCH THINGS as unrelated fields. And it isn't about self-satisfaction. That degree you spoke of is supposed to mean that you got through on the strength of your own abilities and insights. If you (hypothetically) cheat, it's worthless. Even if you get a job with it. Even if your employer doesn't care that you cribbed a few papers on The Great Gatsby in freshman English. It's hollow, because what the degree really says is that you have demonstrated, consistently, that you can think for yourself. And if you cheat, it's just a lie written on expensive paper.
I mean seriously, what the fuck? You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
You know all that droning on the professor did in class? All that stuff about "themes" and "tropes" and "methods of analysis?" Guess what. The professor has already given you the tools you need. Look at your notes, then look at the book. Then hit yourself in the head with either/both until you make the connection.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden. Oh, and at the end you'll actually understand the subject, more than "a tiny bit;" as in, you'll be able to apply the things you've learned elsewhere. I hear there are still some idealistic flower-people wandering about who think that's the whole point of college. Damn hippies.
Plagiarism is like cheating at solitaire. It's not even solitaire anymore. You might as well be throwing cards around randomly. Why the hell would you want to spend four years doing that?
Tip! Get the IP address of the ftp server before attempting the install! DNS isn't picked up on the SuSE boot/install CD.
Bizarrely, this isn't true. It turns out that if you type in an ordinary hostname (i.e. mirror.ac.uk) into the field where it says "IP Address (0.0.0.0)", it works just fine. I have no idea why they decided to label the field that way; it drove me nuts at first until I just said "what the hell" and typed in the hostname.
In the main version of Mozilla there's an option for animated gifs; you can set them not to loop, loop once, or however many times the image wants to. For some idiotic reason they took the option out of the preferences panel for FireWhatever. You can still get at it through about:config; set image.animation_mode to "once" or "none." Done.
Now, if all of geeks who hack it would get rid of their egos and put the best of breed into one utility instead of fighting over 50 or more different ones, then Microsoft would be out of business tomorrow.
Who chooses what's "best of breed"? Maybe one group has '-h' meaning "help", and one group has '-h' meaning 'hexadecimal input', and '-?' meaning help. Maybe there are legitimate disagreements about what the good features are, and not just "ego" problems. And the reason for the "various shells, editors, scripting languages" is because different people like different ones. The truely awful implementations, like the ones where '-h' means "skip every third line of input, except where the fifth word is 'flamingo'," die a natural, Darwinian death because people don't like them, and don't use them.
I appreciate uniformity and clarity, especially in things like Internet standards. In that case, the value in the standard is that without it, the different implementations would be worthless. But I don't see why it's reasonable to expect all commands across all Unixes, Linux, Solaris, or AIX, to function exactly the same.
People *can* create a standardized, windows-like experience from Linux/Unix components; hell, it's what Apple did with one of the BSDs. It's called a distribution. Any company or group is welcome to standardize the '-h' flag to mean 'help' across their distribution, but you certainly can't force me to adopt it.
A lot of Linux distributers are finding that people actually like lots of options. It's the reason SuSE comes with a slew of raster and vector graphics programs, and Windows comes with Microsoft Paint. Speaking of which, I really don't think the point is to kill off Microsoft. I use Linux because I enjoy it and find it useful. I don't care if Microsoft lives or dies, and I think it would be irresponsible to restrict healthy competition just to attack another software developer.
I've been to Culver City, but where on earth are California Alma and Texas Lexington?
In fact, I've heard some math guys voice the opinion that releasing your source code is just a waste. It takes a significant time investment on your part to get it all packaged up, perhaps cleaning up the code some, and then to answer questions people have about it etc. And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released.
This makes absolute sense, if the goal in academia is the same as it is in corporate life: to make the most money and to be at the top of the food chain. On the one hand, people go into science claiming they're not in it for the money (and usually, there *isn't* that much money in it), but will hoard knowledge and backstab viciously to increase their position in the hierarchy. Why bother? They're just trading one type of greed for another.
I don't want to come off sounding completely naive, but I don't think cleaning code up, packaging it, sharing it with the world and answering questions is a waste of time. Similarly, it makes me sad that some professors view courses and lectures as an burdensome part of their job requirement.
No, all that matters is how many journals you published in. So while you were busy cleaning up your source code for release, fixing non-critical bugs and adding non-essential features, you could have been working on the next publication instead.
This really drives me nuts. It's the tragedy of the commons, on a smaller scale. Don't spend time teaching others when you could be advancing your own status. Chances are someone else will choose not to, and get ahead of you! Why help other people when you can put that energy into your own work? Hell, why do we even teach grad students? Before you know it, they have degrees and are competition! So be sure not to teach your Ph.D. students too much. And take their papers and put your name on them. And make sure your undergraduate lectures are boring as hell. That will slow them down.
As for the volume of papers, yes, "publish or perish." Yes, publication is incredibly important in science, and you'll fall flat on your ass if you don't make it a top priority. But the point is to share knowledge as well as get your name in print. Which means that the papers you write should actually SAY something. I think there's something seriously wrong with a system that rewards professorial diva-ism and 1-month publication intervals over sharing knowledge. Maybe this is why we now have hundreds of boring, poorly-written, dubiously constructed papers pouring out of every journal with a logo and a printing press. I'm not doing that much work right now and even so I can barely keep up with it. I don't even want to think about how many the peer reviewers chucked out before publication. Unless you actually have something interesting to say, it's just wasted time.
Hopefully, if the current trend keeps up, people will eventually stop evaluating by number of publications and start looking at their contents and impact. And who knows, maybe they'll even look at other things too.
The point is that I automatically ignore banner ads, as do a huge percentage of Internet users. It's even easier because Mozilla lets you turn off GIF animation, killing off the flashing crap. You can even choose which Flash things you want to see with the Flash Click to View plugin. If they want to enforce a no-block policy, that's their right. It just seems strange that they would invest so much effort in defending a semi-useless advertising technique. But hey, if someone's paying them for it, great. Like the site says, I don't want to pay money if I can pay with ad impressions. Especially if I don't notice them anyway.
Off topic, but there are some odd comments in the HTML source for their pages. Here's a quote:
We may not be happy with Opera software, but we also believe it wrong to hack someone elses software. If "window.opera" returns a true value and "Opera" is not part of the userAgent string reported by the browser, we know that Opera has be cracked.
Whaaa? I thought Opera gave you the option of changing the user agent through a GUI dialog. How is this "hacking?"
Where the REAL money from the movie is made!
Today: New Vader costume.
Tomorrow: Episode III the Flamethrower!
Seriously, though, there does seem to be a lot of good, if occasionally basic, advice here. I remember going through the guides the NSA compiled (warning: obnoxious legalese popup) ages ago, and I see some of the same advice here, e.g. remove the OS/2 and POSIX subsystems, etc.
I'm really confused.
How on earth is this "more convenient" than mozilla's built-in cookie management? Go to Tools->Options->Privacy in FireWhatever. Block them all or use "Enable cookies for current session only" (which seems to be what your script is trying to accomplish, throwing out bad cookies after a day or whenever the job runs) and add Slashdot, NYT, Yahoo! etc. to the convenient "exceptions" menu. Done.
Also, I'm not sure, because I don't write shell scripts often, but:
(1) it looks like this script is going to fill up ".mozilla/old" with copies of old, unfiltered cookie files. So there's a giant record of your browing history hanging around. That seems like a privacy (or embarassment) risk.
(2) if your script starts running at e.g. 11:59:59pm and takes too long, some of the `date` calls will produce different results, and you'll end up trying to operate on non-existant files. You might want to call date just once and store it in a variable or something.
I had all kinds of hardware problems; Red Hat 9 never did recognize my sound card either (Audigy 2), or my TV capture card (Winfast TV2000-something-or-other). I installed SuSE 9.0 a few months ago and it Just Worked out of the box; no hunting for vendor RPMs, no compiling, nothing. I never even saw any reference to "emu10k1" or whatever it was that Red Hat didn't like. It even installed the right driver for my "it's-software-RAID-but-we'll-sell-you-a-card-and- hope-you-think-it's-hardware-RAID" Adaptec 1200A IDE raid card, which Red Hat thought was two independent IDE controllers. (!) And my DVD+/-RW works perfectly as well.
SuSE has been amazing in this regard... if you haven't given it a try I strongly recommend it. 9.1 should be out in a few months; you can install it over the net (a while after store release) or buy the personal edition for cheap. It's literally the first version of linux that I've been able to use as my full-time desktop.
So apart from the plug I guess my point is that it depends on the distro. And consider what happens in the Windows world when you have unsupported hardware, or even vendor drivers that just suck. You're stuck. At least under Linux there might be enough people with the skills/environment to produce an open-source driver.
Never played Counter-Strike, but I did manage to get the original Half-Life working with WINE (in OpenGL mode, obviously). So there's hope.
That would have to get my vote for Slowest Loading Ever, but bear in mind the cassette-loading stuff is before my time. The worst part was that it spent 30 seconds each for the silly, non-skippable cutscenes, even those which just show a ship cruising towards a planet. And this is with a relatively new system, 512MB ram, 7200rpm hard drive, ATA100, etc. (and yes, DMA was on).
I actually enjoyed the game (please don't shoot me), but having to go through that everytime I "quick-loaded" finally wore out my patience. In one of the final battles with the souped-up Kai, I would load, fight for 5 seonds, get killed, load for 30 seconds, fight for 5 seconds , load... etc. I finally didn't even finish the game... it wasn't fun any more. Plus it didn't help that my character moved like a slug on downers and was trying to outrun BLACK HOLES, but that's another complaint. Maybe when I get a system with enough RAM to hold the entire game in memory (next decade) I'll try again.
So my advice would be: let people skip whatever non-essential bits they want, BEFORE you load them. And find a way to make "quick-load" on the current map significantly faster than archive-load of some other map.
keep text logs of the conversations
This one doesn't make sense to me. Do the people who issue handicapped parking permits keep a list of the places people park? These conversations are often intensely personal; it's literally the only way some of these people can use a telephone. I agree completely with authentication, but keeping records seems intrusive and demeaning. And if they are kept, sooner or later the deaf will start getting "targeted" TTY advertisements...
"You recently mentioned to your mother that you're thinking of moving. Contact Local Realtors Inc for a free consulation!", etc.
To say nothing of the legal implications; a warrentless wiretap on thousands of American phones, always running, in plain-text, east-to-search format.
My bad, the formula in paragraph 2 should have read:
E=(1/2)(1000kg*100)(10m/s)^2 = 5e6 joules
The answer is the same; just a typo.