They are too often closed-source trojans to gather personal information for the marketing department (and yes, even once is too often for me)
There are far too many "multimedia plugins", all incompatable with each other.
The plugin developers are constantly releasing new versions with kewl new features, which mean that people are creating content to use the kewl new features, which means the plugin you just downloaded to view content using the lame old features is now obsolete. Time to download the latest version (which will be obsolete moments after you finish downloading).
And once you plow through the junk so you can finally see the "multimedia content", it turns out to be incredibly lame...:=P
I used to listen to spinner.com, but the last time I started the client and got the sorry, you must upgrade to the latest version message, I finally decided it was in no way worth it and just uninstalled.
I have been playing with the idea of hooking up an old dot-matrix printer to print out certain log files, or lines from log files with keywords in them.
Why not stream them to a CDR? IANASE (I am not a security expert), but it seems to be CDRs are also write-once, but have the additional advantage of being greppable (not to mention cheaper and more environmentally friendly -- you would have to kill a lot of trees to print out the text that fits in 650 megs...
Boyer-Moore is a much better algorithm than KMP. The "naive" search algorithm is O(n^2), but only for the very uncommon worst case. Most of the time it runs O(n). The only advantage KMP has is that it avoids the worst case; in practice it is no more efficient.
Boyer-Moore, on the other hand, uses a similar idea to KMP, but to much better advantage. A typical search pattern will let you skip large chunks of data (when there is no match) where KMP would have to examine every character.
First and formost, realize that a good UI design doesn't "just happen", any more than a good internal software design "just happens".
Some more specific thoughts:
Check for and report error conditions. Write error messages from an "external" point of view ("couldn't read file foo.xml" rather than "caught FileNotFoundException at XmlReader.java:327")
Avoid flashy effects. Scroll out menus, transparent dialogs, and bit-mapped title bars needlessly distract the eye from the functional aspects of the UI (bad) and inevitably introduce bugs into the code (worse)
Keep it simple. Especially for beginning users, a very busy UI with lots of elements can be very intimidating.
Provide for the fact the user will make mistakes. Provide cancel buttons, undo features, etc.
Provide help files, preferrably written by someone not familiar with the inner workings of the app, so they are in a place to judge whether the documentation is adequate for someone who doesn't know the codebase.
-y
Re:Are They Tallking About The Same Movie I Saw ?
on
Terry Gilliam's Brazil
·
· Score: 1
Brazil is a beautiful picture about the hacker ethic.
It is? Hmmm. I thought it was a movie about the ineptness of senseless bureacuracy.
And here I thought it was about a man trapped in a reality so oppressive, his only escape is through fantasy. In "real life", Sam Lowry is a faceless, powerless cog in a the state's machine. Ah, but in his fantasies, he's the valiant hero coming to rescue the damsel in distress (pitting fantasy vs. reality is a common theme in TG's films)
The wonderful thing about art is that it's not just the artist's vision -- it's the artist's vision as interpreted by the viewer (or reader, or listener, or whatever).
All three viewpoints are right -- for each of the three viewers. Sure, the Tuttle bit of it isn't the whole movie, but it is a significant piece, and it does fit well with the hacker ethic.
How did Microsoft grow? By swallowing lots of small companies on the verge of big breakthroughs.
AOL, on the other hand, is growing by merging with big, well-established companies like Netscape and Time/Warner. So what? So it's a lot easier to bring a small, fledgling company under the rule of a unified vision. Netscape and Time/Warner already have their own ideas about their vision and their place in the market.
T/W does dominate in one part of their market (cable service), but only a part of it (clearly, they don't dominate as cable content providers(*), or glossy news-lite magazines). Netscape doesn't dominate their market. AOL dominates a segment of their market (ISP to computer illiterates), but certainly not in the broader venue of general ISP. AOL just doesn't hold anything like the same level of dominance that Microsoft has, and I frankly don't think they have much chance of ever getting to that level.
It seems to me the C|Net article was 1 part facts (AOL has merged with T/W) and 9 parts fear mongering (oh no! they're going to take over the world!)
-y
(*) Of course, one could easily argue that being a cable service provider and a content provider is an actionable conflict of interest under existing monopoly laws (eg: the local T/W system showcases the local WB affiliate at every turn, and doesn't even carry the local UPN affiliate -- it's not hard to guess why...)
There's a commercial that's been on TV lately. One line says
In the future, training for all jobs will be available on the internet.
Yeah, right -- what about brain surgery?
The danger with programs of this type is that there is a perception that computers are going to be some magic panacea for all the ills of the educational system. Clearly this is not the case. Computers can be a supplement to education, but they can never be a replacement for actual hands-on experience, or the kind of direction that you can only get from face-to-face interaction with the teacher.
While Icon and Snobol are both good tools for text processing (and GUI facilities have been added to Icon), neither has any kind of a built-in interface to the operating system (there is, eg, no direct way to open a socket in Icon)
Icon has been ported to a number of platforms (tho the graphics facilities are only available under MS Windows, Unix (X), and VAX/VMS)
-y
Re:But is this really for the better?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
[the stock market] may become undervalued
Sooner or later people are going to realize that
The DOJ is unlikely to do anything that will destroy MSFT
Even denied their monopolistic practices, MSFT has an incredible installed base of users, and will probably continue to be profitable for a while yet (OK, so they won't be making money hand-over-fist anymore...)
MSFT stock could very likely be heading for a 2- or 3-1 split
So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see MSFT and the Nasdaq rebound (tho prolly not to the levels they were at) in the next few days.
-y
High resolution earth pictures!
on
Quickielanche
·
· Score: 1
Get your high-resolution earth pictures at http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/ (assuming, of course, that 25 megapixels is high enough resolution to suit you!)
It's been a long time since I had any physics, but I seem to remember that orbital period is a function of the masses of the bodies and how far apart they are.
It seems to me for a gas giant to orbit a sun in 3 days, they would have to be really close, right? My gut reaction is that an orbit that close would be unstable. Has anyone studied the dynamics of a situation like this?
rms' position (at least, in part) is that the following two statements:
Linux was created independently of the FSF
the Linux developers used FSF tools
are mutually contradictory. I would tend to agree with this point.
Also, while the Linux kernel itself is not part of GNU, I would be surprised if there's any Linux distribution out there that doesn't include a boatload of GNU software in key supporting roles.
So while the Linux kernel is not a part of GNU as such, I don't think that rms is out of line expecting that Linux and Linux distributions acknowledge the debt they owe to GNU and the FSF. Without FSF tools, Linux never would have progressed beyond the "obscure hobbyists' amusement" stage.
This will never happen without a major philosophy change at MS. Right now, for better or worse, MS views their proprietary OS as the keystone in their monopoly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dominant market position. Neal Stephenson talkes about this in his essay In the beginning was the command line (also available in dead tree format
Could one port all the standard command line utilities to NT, clone one or two of the popular shells
This has been done. Trust me, it doesn't make NT feel very much like Unix -- it just makes it a nicer place to work (at least, for someone familiar with the Unix command line).
For me, there are two main areas that distinguish "Unixness":
The file system interface. By this, I mean inodes, ugo/rwx permissions, and a single hierarchy rooted at "/".
There is one user (root) that has full access to the machine; all other users are limited to a small "sandbox"
Note that no simple user-level gloss that's going to make an NT box have these features.
Why am I so suspicious of the statement, "eliminating the 'memory limit' barrier." ?
Because it's not really true? Do a little math: let's take the memory size of "today" as 128meg (=2^27 bytes). That leaves 2^(64-27) = 2^37 memory size doublings before the 64bit memory space is full.
The article says memory size has increased by a factor of 16 in the last 8 years -- if we extrapolate that out, solving
2^(27 + 4n) = 2^64 => n = 37/4
it will take 37/4 = 9.25 8-year periods (or about 74 years, give or take) for memory sizes to reach 2^64bytes.
Now, I am no means convinced that memory sizes will continue to be driven to increase at the same speed they have in the last 8 years. OTOH, any kind of sustained exponential growth will fill up the 64bit address space within a few centuries... (to be sure, not something we need to worry about any time soon)
the German recording industry is selling the idea that they should have carte blanche to block any incoming packets they see fit,
OK. So you want to block packets containing MP3 data. How are you going to recognize MP3 data? You must assume, of course, that the pirates will quickly switch to SSL, possibly augmented by other encryption schemes. And you can't tell a packet of encrypted MP3 from a packet of more innocuous encrypted data because, well, they're encrypted.
Beyond that, there would be no way to tell the difference between an MP3 containing copyrighted data and an MP3 containing something you own (like, say, a recording of your daughter's violin recital). Blocking MP3s at the packet level would amount to a net-wide ban on the MP3 format (of course, I don't suppose RIAA would shed many tears if that happened...)
why is the best software writing organization on earth unable to produce innovative interfaces, when small commercial software companies do so with regularity
Sure, lack of feedback from more naive users is an issue. But that could be overcome if (in my experience, anyway) coding a UI weren't so deadly dull.
In a commercial environment, a project manager can assign the UI coding to someone. In open source, someone typically has to volunteer to do it. And who is going to volunteer to do UI programming when there is always internals to work on somewhere?
it would not be difficult at all to write a program such as this as say, a Linux/BSD/whatever daemon
It already exists -- it's called the telnet daemon. Just telnet in, su to root, and reboot.
The problem is, of course, that many times the reason you want to reboot is because the machine is hung, and daemons are not responding. Something outside the normal system is required.
Sending unencrypted email is about as private as sending a postcard through the snail mail. Sending unencrypted email at work to a mailing list... you might as well be shouting from the rooftops.
It's one thing when the mundane media express shock at this concept, but one would think that/. editors would have a higher clue level.
The law has a concept of "expectation of privacy". If you tell your lawyer "I'm guilty" in the middle of the courtroom, loud enough for the prosecution to hear, all the claims of attourney-client privalege in the world aren't going to help you, because you had no excpectation of privacy.
Sending private information in the clear over the internet is like walking naked in front of a picture window -- you can be sure that sooner or later, both are going to draw people's attention.
I took the time and looked at a couple of his books. However I noticed really fast that in fact I could hardly understand a fraction of what was therin contained.
You definitely need to approach these books with the right attitude. They are not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. Each section requires careful thought for complete understanding.
You also have to get used to Knuth's writing style. I was reading a section on floating point representation, and came across a sentence that read
The radix can be interpreted as being on the extreme left (liberally) or on the extreme right (conservatively).
I don't know how long I stared at that sentence trying to figure out what he was talking about. Finially, I realized he was making a joke! (For those who don't get it, in the US, political liberals are described as being "on the left" and conservatives "on the right". Why, I have no idea...)
The 4cite URL listed above (http://www.4cite.org/states.html) lists the status of UCITA introduction in each state. A number of states (including New York, where I live) are listed as "Will not introduce".
Does anyone know exactly what this means? In particular, how strong is the "will not"?
The more closed-source vendors employ Machiavellian tactics like the UCITA, the more attractive (at least to me) open-source software becomes.
How much would you be willing to pay for some big money closed source software if you knew the vendor could uninstall it at their discretion? It would be like buying software with its own built-in trojan horse!.
It's much better, I think, to run software that gives you complete control.
Check out the "Astronomy picture of the day" for 02/10/00, which features a very cool (but unfortunately very low resolution) movie of asteroid 433, which Eros is set to rendezvous with on 2/14/00... -y
Slashdot Mirror
- They are too often closed-source trojans to gather personal information for the marketing department (and yes, even once is too often for me)
- There are far too many "multimedia plugins", all incompatable with each other.
- The plugin developers are constantly releasing new versions with kewl new features, which mean that people are creating content to use the kewl new features, which means the plugin you just downloaded to view content using the lame old features is now obsolete. Time to download the latest version (which will be obsolete moments after you finish downloading).
- And once you plow through the junk so you can finally see the "multimedia content", it turns out to be incredibly lame...
:=P
I used to listen to spinner.com, but the last time I started the client and got the sorry, you must upgrade to the latest version message, I finally decided it was in no way worth it and just uninstalled.-y
Boyer-Moore, on the other hand, uses a similar idea to KMP, but to much better advantage. A typical search pattern will let you skip large chunks of data (when there is no match) where KMP would have to examine every character.
-y
Also watch http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ every day for the astronomy picture of the day (almost always interesting, and sometimes root window art)
Some more specific thoughts:
- Check for and report error conditions. Write error messages from an "external" point of view ("couldn't read file foo.xml" rather than "caught FileNotFoundException at XmlReader.java:327")
- Avoid flashy effects. Scroll out menus, transparent dialogs, and bit-mapped title bars needlessly distract the eye from the functional aspects of the UI (bad) and inevitably introduce bugs into the code (worse)
- Keep it simple. Especially for beginning users, a very busy UI with lots of elements can be very intimidating.
- Provide for the fact the user will make mistakes. Provide cancel buttons, undo features, etc.
- Provide help files, preferrably written by someone not familiar with the inner workings of the app, so they are in a place to judge whether the documentation is adequate for someone who doesn't know the codebase.
-yThe wonderful thing about art is that it's not just the artist's vision -- it's the artist's vision as interpreted by the viewer (or reader, or listener, or whatever).
All three viewpoints are right -- for each of the three viewers. Sure, the Tuttle bit of it isn't the whole movie, but it is a significant piece, and it does fit well with the hacker ethic.
-y
How did Microsoft grow? By swallowing lots of small companies on the verge of big breakthroughs.
AOL, on the other hand, is growing by merging with big, well-established companies like Netscape and Time/Warner. So what? So it's a lot easier to bring a small, fledgling company under the rule of a unified vision. Netscape and Time/Warner already have their own ideas about their vision and their place in the market.
T/W does dominate in one part of their market (cable service), but only a part of it (clearly, they don't dominate as cable content providers(*), or glossy news-lite magazines). Netscape doesn't dominate their market. AOL dominates a segment of their market (ISP to computer illiterates), but certainly not in the broader venue of general ISP. AOL just doesn't hold anything like the same level of dominance that Microsoft has, and I frankly don't think they have much chance of ever getting to that level.
It seems to me the C|Net article was 1 part facts (AOL has merged with T/W) and 9 parts fear mongering (oh no! they're going to take over the world!)
-y
(*) Of course, one could easily argue that being a cable service provider and a content provider is an actionable conflict of interest under existing monopoly laws (eg: the local T/W system showcases the local WB affiliate at every turn, and doesn't even carry the local UPN affiliate -- it's not hard to guess why...)
The danger with programs of this type is that there is a perception that computers are going to be some magic panacea for all the ills of the educational system. Clearly this is not the case. Computers can be a supplement to education, but they can never be a replacement for actual hands-on experience, or the kind of direction that you can only get from face-to-face interaction with the teacher.
-y
- Its been (successfully, imo) superceded by Icon (cf http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon)
- While Icon and Snobol are both good tools for text processing (and GUI facilities have been added to Icon), neither has any kind of a built-in interface to the operating system (there is, eg, no direct way to open a socket in Icon)
Icon has been ported to a number of platforms (tho the graphics facilities are only available under MS Windows, Unix (X), and VAX/VMS)-y
Sooner or later people are going to realize that
- The DOJ is unlikely to do anything that will destroy MSFT
- Even denied their monopolistic practices, MSFT has an incredible installed base of users, and will probably continue to be profitable for a while yet (OK, so they won't be making money hand-over-fist anymore...)
- MSFT stock could very likely be heading for a 2- or 3-1 split
So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see MSFT and the Nasdaq rebound (tho prolly not to the levels they were at) in the next few days.-y
-y
It's been a long time since I had any physics, but I seem to remember that orbital period is a function of the masses of the bodies and how far apart they are.
It seems to me for a gas giant to orbit a sun in 3 days, they would have to be really close, right? My gut reaction is that an orbit that close would be unstable. Has anyone studied the dynamics of a situation like this?
-y
- Linux was created independently of the FSF
- the Linux developers used FSF tools
are mutually contradictory. I would tend to agree with this point.Also, while the Linux kernel itself is not part of GNU, I would be surprised if there's any Linux distribution out there that doesn't include a boatload of GNU software in key supporting roles.
So while the Linux kernel is not a part of GNU as such, I don't think that rms is out of line expecting that Linux and Linux distributions acknowledge the debt they owe to GNU and the FSF. Without FSF tools, Linux never would have progressed beyond the "obscure hobbyists' amusement" stage.
-y
This will never happen without a major philosophy change at MS. Right now, for better or worse, MS views their proprietary OS as the keystone in their monopoly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dominant market position. Neal Stephenson talkes about this in his essay In the beginning was the command line (also available in dead tree format
-y
This has been done. Trust me, it doesn't make NT feel very much like Unix -- it just makes it a nicer place to work (at least, for someone familiar with the Unix command line).
For me, there are two main areas that distinguish "Unixness":
- The file system interface. By this, I mean inodes, ugo/rwx permissions, and a single hierarchy rooted at "/".
- There is one user (root) that has full access to the machine; all other users are limited to a small "sandbox"
Note that no simple user-level gloss that's going to make an NT box have these features.-y
Because it's not really true? Do a little math: let's take the memory size of "today" as 128meg (=2^27 bytes). That leaves 2^(64-27) = 2^37 memory size doublings before the 64bit memory space is full.
The article says memory size has increased by a factor of 16 in the last 8 years -- if we extrapolate that out, solving
it will take 37/4 = 9.25 8-year periods (or about 74 years, give or take) for memory sizes to reach 2^64bytes.Now, I am no means convinced that memory sizes will continue to be driven to increase at the same speed they have in the last 8 years. OTOH, any kind of sustained exponential growth will fill up the 64bit address space within a few centuries... (to be sure, not something we need to worry about any time soon)
-y
OK. So you want to block packets containing MP3 data. How are you going to recognize MP3 data? You must assume, of course, that the pirates will quickly switch to SSL, possibly augmented by other encryption schemes. And you can't tell a packet of encrypted MP3 from a packet of more innocuous encrypted data because, well, they're encrypted.
Beyond that, there would be no way to tell the difference between an MP3 containing copyrighted data and an MP3 containing something you own (like, say, a recording of your daughter's violin recital). Blocking MP3s at the packet level would amount to a net-wide ban on the MP3 format (of course, I don't suppose RIAA would shed many tears if that happened...)
-y
Sure, lack of feedback from more naive users is an issue. But that could be overcome if (in my experience, anyway) coding a UI weren't so deadly dull.
In a commercial environment, a project manager can assign the UI coding to someone. In open source, someone typically has to volunteer to do it. And who is going to volunteer to do UI programming when there is always internals to work on somewhere?
-y
It already exists -- it's called the telnet daemon. Just telnet in, su to root, and reboot.
The problem is, of course, that many times the reason you want to reboot is because the machine is hung, and daemons are not responding. Something outside the normal system is required.
-y
It's one thing when the mundane media express shock at this concept, but one would think that /. editors would have a higher clue level.
The law has a concept of "expectation of privacy". If you tell your lawyer "I'm guilty" in the middle of the courtroom, loud enough for the prosecution to hear, all the claims of attourney-client privalege in the world aren't going to help you, because you had no excpectation of privacy.
Sending private information in the clear over the internet is like walking naked in front of a picture window -- you can be sure that sooner or later, both are going to draw people's attention.
You definitely need to approach these books with the right attitude. They are not light reading by any stretch of the imagination. Each section requires careful thought for complete understanding.
You also have to get used to Knuth's writing style. I was reading a section on floating point representation, and came across a sentence that read
I don't know how long I stared at that sentence trying to figure out what he was talking about. Finially, I realized he was making a joke! (For those who don't get it, in the US, political liberals are described as being "on the left" and conservatives "on the right". Why, I have no idea...)-y
Does anyone know exactly what this means? In particular, how strong is the "will not"?
-y
How much would you be willing to pay for some big money closed source software if you knew the vendor could uninstall it at their discretion? It would be like buying software with its own built-in trojan horse!.
It's much better, I think, to run software that gives you complete control.
-y
Check out the "Astronomy picture of the day" for 02/10/00, which features a very cool (but unfortunately very low resolution) movie of asteroid 433, which Eros is set to rendezvous with on 2/14/00... -y
Share & enjoy :-)