If the system is well designed. I'm oversimplifying this but imagine that the watermark is a particular series of color variation on certain colors. You don't know the colors and you don't know the variations. Moreover, you don't know on which frames they appear.
Throw in a series of random variations in colors (who don't affect the visual perception in a sensitive way) and you have yourself a nice problem.
If done right, removing the watermark is really a decryption problem. Not impossible, but very very hard to crack and then computationally expensive: think about how long it takes to rip just one DVD now you are looking at at least 4-5 passes over this data (I'm being super optimistic here).
It would complicate things a great deal really if you really want to remove it.
Agree. I don't know where all this whining comes from. All I ask for in online newspapers is some "printable version" button that gets rid of the adds in case I want to save the article.
All I hear is a bunch of geeks that are concerned about tiny details that most people don't notice. Online papers are great just the way they are in terms of format. The New York times is a great example.
There is also some comment above saying that PDF is a solution but not a good one because it does not look good on a mobile dev. PDF is for printing, it should be judged by how good it looks on a page.
Browsers could have a better render of the fonts (like Acrobat reader does with PDF!).
Another thing to improve would be for browsers to save pages in a single file, do it *easily* (something like what MS does with.mht) and be able to recover the page exactly how it looks at the time of the save, even if Javascript changes (like the ones done in Ajax) have occurred. This would not be that hard since at any given point in time, there is a specific object model corresponding to the document displayed in the browser window.
Other than that, things are just fine the way they are.
I would add the note that I am now reading my technical books online in HTML (safari.com). Yes, *reading*, not trying to get information on a specific issue; and I am very happy with the experience. Would I prefer to have the book in PDF? no, the only reason I would like to have it in PDF would be to save this file. I would prefer to have a single file that represents the whole hypertext book that I can navigate the same way that I navigate the book online.
Can things be improved? yes and if they do they will probably be changed by the guy of the comment above (the one who says that he has been concerned with this problem for 15 years) or one of the whiners; not by me.
A big part of HCI these days is through GUIs. According to the article, this is the specific area of HCI where Buxton has made significant contributions.
The offer for women in CS is basically the following: that of a career which *seems* (emphasis on appearance) to be shrinking *and* where you will be discriminated due to your gender.
No wonder women are choosing other careers.
Yet another unsolvable contradiction of this intrinsecally falocentric economic system: capitalism.
He would have to pay taxes in NY even if he lives in India.
The great majority of the opinons that I read go completely against the logic of modern tax policies. At an international level, there are many bilateral treaties to avoid double taxation. That's the technical term here, not an "opinion"; I read below about this being double or not double, double taxation is the correct technical term for this situation.
Double taxation usually creates a lot of friction for commerce and is generally considered unreasonable in modern international tax policy, specially when the two countries involved have somwhat similar personal income taxes.
Double taxation agreements are considered a precedent of a rise in commerce between two countries. So yes, there is evidence that it is a problem for commerce.
The only cases where international double taxation agreements have problems is when one of the countries is a tax haven (there are usually no double taxation treaties with such countries). That situation might complicate matters here in the US because of the tax differences between the different states.
In the future, I see that it would be very natural for states to start signing these agreements, specially when the both of them have comparable income taxes. This would eliminate the nighmare scenarios at least.
It is reasonable to take international double taxation as a precedent, since it deals with a lot of similar issues.
This is a Cost / Benefit joke. Those ridiculous percentage points that you gain by adding this memory are nothing compared to what the average computer spends on swapping. Swapping is in my view the worst performance problem that I see in the average office or home computer these days.
Instead of buying one of this modules at twice the cost, I'd say go and buy twice as much memory. Plese note that I have the average computer in mind, not those steroid pumped mutants that some o' my geek friedns have (you have to be geek and have the cash!).
That's the beauty of rootkits. They modify the normal operation of an OS; yes, even one that does not allow "invisible processes" (to give it some same). Here is a short and informal explanation (where there is probably an accuracy compromise for simplification purposes):
At a user level, to "see" a process, you would open the task manager (Windows) or use the PS command in Unix. But you must note that these are merely applications that ultimately make a call to a OS level API and request this information; then they display whatever this API returns them.
The OS level API is just a piece of code that will have access to the internal OS data structures that hold the information for the processes. This code would piece together a response with the processes names, etc. and return this "list".
So, what would happen if I go and modify the code that pieces together this list of processes and omit the "worm.exe" process everytime? Well, that's pretty much a rootkit virus strategy.
The result is that you wouldn't be able to see the process anywhere. Any program that uses this OS API call would not see the process, be it ps, the Task Manager or an Antivirus.
So . . . why not providing every program with a direct access to the running processes structures so that they can "see" all the information there and "figure out" by themselves whether there is a virus or not.
Well . . . that's a disaster from a security standpoint since it would provide an avenue for viruses to exploit. And this "direct access" is never direct, it is always through another OS API that may in turn be modified to hide the virus . . .
So . . . why not scanning the disk?, I mean, the virus must be stored somewhere if it will run.
Well . . . file access is done by an OS call that may be modified to hide the virus.
So . . . why not doing an OS module that performs an CRC check and make sure that the OS APIs have not been modified?
Well . . . this too can be modified not to include the file that you infected in the first place.
So . . . why not making OSs "unmodifiable".
Well . . . how would you then install it in the first place? (that is pretty much a modification) or install security updates? (that's another modification).
So . . . Well . . . ad infinutum.
I think I made my point.
Anyways, the bottom line is that you can only do all those modifications *if* you have privileges to modify system files. You have to have "root" access for that. So once you have broken the security of an OS to the point where your virus can modify OS system files, you are pretty much doomed.
Ideally, the solution is a secure operating system, where regularly you run your user programs with an account whose privileges do not include modifying OS files and any processes that you start cannot breach that security (again *ideally*). You would only use the root account to do OS installs and updates (if the virus gets you while you are at it, you are doomed again, so shut down AIM!).
That's why Windows is so dangerous, because the normal XP user is running with an Administrator account (similar to having root privileges), so any application that is infected can potentially cause a root-level infection.
And then, no matter how much you program securely, the missing piece as usual is education. At some point, even in the ideal OS, the user would have to log in with the root account to do OS changes or at least explicitly authorize in some manual way the modification of system files (that would be my choice just to make things easier to learn for everyone in the real world).
This actually supports my completely unscientific theory: that to cut addictions, what you have to do is not loose the "bad habits" completely, but reduce them dramatically.
WARNING: I suspect that it only works with substances that are do not have strong physical addiction components. I wouldn't know anything about that since I have never consumed them.
The example in my life has been smoking. I used to smoke a pack a day. I tried to quit many times but then I would light one cigarette after months and would be back at one pack a day overnight.
On my latest attempt, I just decided that I love smoking and would like to continue smoking for years. Solution: cut back to one cigarette a day. It has been working incredibly for over 4 years now!!!
The most amazing thing is that I can't smoke more than 3 cigarettes in one day, my body just can't tolerate it. The key here is that for my brain, smoking one cigarette does not mean smoking 30 cigarettes anymore.
But that theory goes head to head with the traditional protestant morale: substances are bad, they are evil, and once you get them in your system, they control you (evil is something separated from the human nature that can go inside or outside of you, like a spirit).
Since the American culture is based on that morale, those ideas are pervasive in the US. Some psychologists have suggested that the American cultural myths about addictive substances reinforce addictive behaviors, i.e. the substance controls me, so if I take one drink I can't help drinking the whole bottle/smoke the whole pack.
Of course the American "experts" will say what you are saying is very dangerous, the first step is to accept that you have an alcoholism/tabaquism/whatever problem . . . blah blah blah.
But take a look at Europe and how Alcohol is not considered such an evil in a lot of countries. Italians take wine with meals, even in workdays. In the US, if you take two drinks, you are supposed to do something stupid. So you do in a lot of cases.
Bottom line: a lot of substances are not that evil. They cannot control you, the better way to kill addictions is to reduce intake to a minimum and then your brain will be retrained to take these small dosages normally.
After reading this article, not only I think that smoking my one cigarette a day is nice, but I think that it is actually way a better method to prevent me from going back to one pack a day than not smoking at all.
I think that pages in wikipedia must have owners that take responsibility for the content of the article. The motivation for this would be simply the credit of being the editor of a certain page. If you look at scientific publications, all along, the credit for writing has been the main motivation, not direct money. Yes, then universities then transform that merit into money, but that happens later.
Different areas should have boards that assign ownership of the pages to individuals that request ownership of the pages. Again, those committees can be chosen on the basis of merit by the wikiepdia guys. The members of these boards have the merit of being in the boards.
But what does it mean to own a page? the page is locked and you have to approve anything before it is published?
No, that is really not necessary. Simply your friggin name appears on top. So if the information below is wrong, you are ridiculed.
Wikipedia has become very important, too important. People are going to be interested in having their name associated with it.
Hell, I'd love to be the editor of the Java entry in Wikipedia. I'd love to have that in my resume. Or better yet, be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the CS pages.
Wouldn't you like to be the editor of the Klingon page? or be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the Sci Fi pages?
This is technically easy to implement, it would all work free and people who are controlling the quality of the information in the pages would receive credit for it.
You would have the most important element in quality assurance: someone to blame if there is a quality problem.
Big companies will be scrutinizing patents all the time and routinely file challenges against little guys when they feel that the patent might affect them.
Then the little guys will have to fund their own patent defense. The big guys have a clear edge here because they have more resources.
They already have the ability to do that in a litigation case, but this gives them the ability to do it preemptively. That last word is becoming increasingly popular.
How about webapp debugging?. Using the old Forte (I dunno how they call it now), which was NetBeans based, I could step through my servlet code. I cannot do that in Eclipse, partly because it has no servlet engine in it.
Re:Netbroken. . . but it had webapp debugging!
on
Netbeans 4.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
True, it was very unstable. But I would like it better than Eclipse (if it didn't crash and was faster). I was never able to find webapp debugging in Eclipse, so now I'm down to printouts.
There must be something better out there. Am I missing some webapp debug tool for Eclipse?
Another thing: I loved the Search/Highlight feature (like the google bar). I think that this is fundamental for OO programming: you search for an object identifier in a piece of code and then you are able to quickly look at all the methods that are called on that object so you get an immediate feeling of what the code is doing to manipulate the object. Ecplise does not have that.
But it works, so I am using Eclipse.
As for the question: noup, NB is not eclipsing anything. It was about to eclipse Eclipse but it crashed yet another time and missed its chance.
There is a lot of internet phone companies outthere (Vonage, Net2Phone). I want to get an Internet telephone in my home this month. Which one should I choose?, what is you experience with these different services?
I know, it is phony anyways. If I have a connection to google that is much slower than the connection to the real page's server, then I may actually waste time by getting the page from google as opposed to the orig server.
The larger your proxy is, the more probabilities you have of finding that page that you are looking for in the proxy's cache.
Google has a tremendous amount of cached pages and images.
That's where the real gain comes from.
Plus, the trad proxys that I know do not compress. I don't know how relevant this is because for the most part, web pages' heavy stuff is not text but images that are already compressed. Still, this will save you some time.
Then keep in mind that the google servers are probably faster than other servers and more resistant to slashdot-and-the-likes web tsunamis.
To all of you who think that things can really be changed from behind the keyboard, I tell you: big companies will nail open source sooner or later.
Maybe this is it; it surely looks like it. They are certainly preparing the legal grounds to do so. They will get there sooner or later because they just have the power to do so. At some point they will start suing either the developers, the open source software distributing companies or the users; or of course, all of the above.
In our little slashdotian world, behind our glasses and our computer screens, we feel powerful. And we have the naive belief that because we the mosquitoes have been able to cause the giants a little pain or because some of the giants have directed the little power we have against other giants we really have power. Our power is completely overestimated by our community.
This is just the software developers version of the American myth that the little guy has a chance against the big guys. Bullshit. The little guy always looses, except for the one or two cases that the powerful people publicize to their convenience to pacify us with the illusion that we live in a system in which we can get justice if we fight nicely; that is, within the rules of a game where we are at a complete disadvantage.
The exception to this rule comes only when the little guys come together and fight together, like in the fight for civil rights or the huge strikes during the 20's and 30's that forced the ruling class to institute the social security system (no liberals, it was not because Roosevelt was a visionary or a hero or a nice guy, it was because they were forced to do so by the pressure of the masses).
So the bottom line is political power. How are we in that area? not even at zero. We are further behind zero because we have the illusion that we have a voice here in slashdot and in other blogs. Bullshit. Nobody cares about this. Nobody reads this. The larger society looks at us as freaks. Yes, they all believe that hackers are closer to Saddam than to Robin Hood.
We can't gather 20 guys to go out on the street to protest anything. Look at the women's march for the right to choose last year. That's how you demand something. And even that way it is very hard (I am not saying that the demand was right or wrong, I am just talking about the tactics).
Open source is just like PC software piracy during the eighties. Everybody said "it's too extended, they are not going to go after all that people". Blah blah blah. They did start going after everyone. They let that go on as long as it was convenient for them, it continued for a while when it was not a big problem for them and then, when it as not in their interests they started shooting.
In the bigger scheme of things, Open Source does not exist. The only way that something like this counts is if we struggle for this in a wider political perspective. And that ain't gonna happen.
I know what you mean, but I really hope that one day I can have all this stuff in one device and that all the devices are high quality.
Personally, I am not upgrading my 2 megapixel camera. I like taking photos all the time and I thought about getting a slim digital camera because I hate carrying around my bulky camera, but I would feel ridiculous carrying around the camera and the phone. The key is that I really need to carry it, so I don't want to carry separate devices.
I am more interested in the memory stuff than in the mp3s, but if you have memory in a device that generates sound, it should have some jack to plug-in my headphones and just listen. Come on!
I don't consider it a big deal, this is something that should simply work in such a device.
This may be new (it looks like it isn't) but in any case, you can just see that convergence is around the corner and it does not make sense to spend money in a device like this. ..
So, I won't buy another cellular until it telerports me.
The image that this woman is describing of a blogger is preety extreme and bogus. Sure, I read Slashdot, I read some comments and I post some comments. Period. I don't consider myself a blogger. I also watch TV, read books, the NYT and listen to the radio. None of these media by themselves would accurately describe my life. Nor they are my only source of knowledge (by all means!).
I don't think that most of the people around here devote their lives to blogging. If you work at slashdot, or you are an editor (I don't know how that works) you would be considered a "pro" blogger. Big deal. Any profession confines you to an area of specialization, I don't think that this is particularly harmful in that respect. Even in this case I'm preety sure that is better than people that dedicate their lives to cat shows as far as intellectual development goes.
If this is all you read, this is all you write and if you think that you are changing the world by ranting about MS in this forum, yes, you are a/. blogger and the description of this woman may very well fit you.
I remember talking once to a person of a numerically unimportant religion, considered to be a little crazy. She said to me: yes, there are some people like that, but for some reason, people tend to identify us with the most exaggerate ones; they are a minority in our group and they don't run the show.
True bloggers are a tiny minority, not representative of the crowd.
- # -
You my friend have become a caricature of your own people. And now, everybody thinks that they are all like you.
Yeah, it's down, but that's not the worst of it -- even with nothing available to see, it's still looking more entertaining than Episodes 1 and 2
That's because the only way to go here is up. If this was worse, the only way to go would be to subdivide it in 6 pieces and put it as an obscure series in the Sci-Fi channel late at night after the X-Files reruns. It wouldn't be a movie, it would be a lame 2 hour sci-fi soap opera.
The man with the badge just finished to surround the movies with police tape. There was blood everywhere. He grabbed the bullhorn and shouted: there's nothing to see here people, move on.
In other news, a man found in the help system that with Ms Word he can actually number the pages automatically.
This is a proof that reading the help system is really important, almost as important as reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper. declared S. Baldmir, CEO of the transilvania-based software giant.
I'm really happy about this, it was a nightmare having to number the pages one by one declared F. Drakul, a 48 year old gravedigger. I also found in their help system a letter written by grandmother to her lover (as it turns out, I apparently have chinese blood), a couple of passwords for porn-sites and the cellular telephone number of Paris Hilton. concluded the man as he proudly displayed his coffee-stained teeth with huge smile.
The idea behind this article is absolutely ridiculous. Why would anyone think that you can reproduce the way that people solve problems by talking to them?
This is the formula:
A "normal" intelligent person can explain how he solves a problem.
You interview them.
You learn how they do it and then reproduce it.
Bullshit.
So:
I interview Donald Knuth and ask him how he came up with all his shit.
I copy it and become at least a good problem solver as him.
I interview Fermat too (this is all bullshit anyways so I have a time machine).
I become as good as the both of them combined, now I just need to read enough material.
As I said bullshit.
We have no idea about how we solve problems. How do you know 2+2=4? mmmm. ooohhhh..... I seee the figure of a number 2 and another number 2 and a plus sign and the fat ass of my first grade teacher and then. . . it all comes together.
Try asking your computer how it solves problems.
Here's another angle: we've been trying to do that in AI for decades and very few interesting things came up. On the great majority of them it is highly questionable that the intelligent program solves its problem the way we do.
We are not designed to explain how we solve the problems that we solve. If a Savant can communicate with us he will be as clueless as we are with regards to the mechanisms that he uses to solve his problems.
1. I strongly disagree with Theo's actions: he shouldn't have taken the money in the first place.
Yes, I know what you're thinking: it is stupid not to take money.
Ever heard about a guy called Fausto?
(the one who sold his soul to Bill G...oops sorry, the Devil).
Don't ever work with or funded by an organization with whom you have major ethical differences. I'm not talking about minor stuff, I'm talking about big differences. In this case there were obviously huge disagreements.
Make a stand for what you believe in.
2. Dude: about your comment, it is obvious that you don't really believe in freedom of speech. Government repression is not the only repression it is just one in an array (java.util.ArrayList, not String[n]) of repression techniques. We have seen a lot of that lately.
The law is not the only parameter. What is happening with the restrain of freedom of speech is plain wrong, it is simply shameful.
Do you really believe in freedom of speech or not?. As a value I mean, not as a law. I'm talking about right and wrong here, not about legal or illegal.
Remember about right and wrong? they came to the world long before law.
Shame on all of you who believe in lynching socially, politically and/or economically those who dissent with the war and then go blah blah blah about the "freedom" that dissenters have because they don't go to jail for their thoughts.
Slashdot Mirror
If the system is well designed. I'm oversimplifying this but imagine that the watermark is a particular series of color variation on certain colors. You don't know the colors and you don't know the variations. Moreover, you don't know on which frames they appear.
Throw in a series of random variations in colors (who don't affect the visual perception in a sensitive way) and you have yourself a nice problem.
If done right, removing the watermark is really a decryption problem. Not impossible, but very very hard to crack and then computationally expensive: think about how long it takes to rip just one DVD now you are looking at at least 4-5 passes over this data (I'm being super optimistic here).
It would complicate things a great deal really if you really want to remove it.
both databases were reported to have more bugs than the Windows notepad.
:)
Further studies also showed that the windows notepad was to be more difficult to use than pen & paper and that oranges have more juice than apples
All I hear is a bunch of geeks that are concerned about tiny details that most people don't notice. Online papers are great just the way they are in terms of format. The New York times is a great example.
There is also some comment above saying that PDF is a solution but not a good one because it does not look good on a mobile dev. PDF is for printing, it should be judged by how good it looks on a page.
Browsers could have a better render of the fonts (like Acrobat reader does with PDF!).
Another thing to improve would be for browsers to save pages in a single file, do it *easily* (something like what MS does with .mht) and be able to recover the page exactly how it looks at the time of the save, even if Javascript changes (like the ones done in Ajax) have occurred. This would not be that hard since at any given point in time, there is a specific object model corresponding to the document displayed in the browser window.
Other than that, things are just fine the way they are.
I would add the note that I am now reading my technical books online in HTML (safari.com). Yes, *reading*, not trying to get information on a specific issue; and I am very happy with the experience. Would I prefer to have the book in PDF? no, the only reason I would like to have it in PDF would be to save this file. I would prefer to have a single file that represents the whole hypertext book that I can navigate the same way that I navigate the book online.
Can things be improved? yes and if they do they will probably be changed by the guy of the comment above (the one who says that he has been concerned with this problem for 15 years) or one of the whiners; not by me.
A big part of HCI these days is through GUIs. According to the article, this is the specific area of HCI where Buxton has made significant contributions.
No wonder women are choosing other careers.
Yet another unsolvable contradiction of this intrinsecally falocentric economic system: capitalism.
And I am under 30. S
He would have to pay taxes in NY even if he lives in India.
The great majority of the opinons that I read go completely against the logic of modern tax policies. At an international level, there are many bilateral treaties to avoid double taxation. That's the technical term here, not an "opinion"; I read below about this being double or not double, double taxation is the correct technical term for this situation.
Double taxation usually creates a lot of friction for commerce and is generally considered unreasonable in modern international tax policy, specially when the two countries involved have somwhat similar personal income taxes.
Double taxation agreements are considered a precedent of a rise in commerce between two countries. So yes, there is evidence that it is a problem for commerce.
The only cases where international double taxation agreements have problems is when one of the countries is a tax haven (there are usually no double taxation treaties with such countries). That situation might complicate matters here in the US because of the tax differences between the different states.
In the future, I see that it would be very natural for states to start signing these agreements, specially when the both of them have comparable income taxes. This would eliminate the nighmare scenarios at least.
It is reasonable to take international double taxation as a precedent, since it deals with a lot of similar issues.
Instead of buying one of this modules at twice the cost, I'd say go and buy twice as much memory. Plese note that I have the average computer in mind, not those steroid pumped mutants that some o' my geek friedns have (you have to be geek and have the cash!).
At a user level, to "see" a process, you would open the task manager (Windows) or use the PS command in Unix. But you must note that these are merely applications that ultimately make a call to a OS level API and request this information; then they display whatever this API returns them.
The OS level API is just a piece of code that will have access to the internal OS data structures that hold the information for the processes. This code would piece together a response with the processes names, etc. and return this "list".
So, what would happen if I go and modify the code that pieces together this list of processes and omit the "worm.exe" process everytime? Well, that's pretty much a rootkit virus strategy.
The result is that you wouldn't be able to see the process anywhere. Any program that uses this OS API call would not see the process, be it ps, the Task Manager or an Antivirus.
So . . . why not providing every program with a direct access to the running processes structures so that they can "see" all the information there and "figure out" by themselves whether there is a virus or not.
Well . . . that's a disaster from a security standpoint since it would provide an avenue for viruses to exploit. And this "direct access" is never direct, it is always through another OS API that may in turn be modified to hide the virus . . .
So . . . why not scanning the disk?, I mean, the virus must be stored somewhere if it will run.
Well . . . file access is done by an OS call that may be modified to hide the virus.
So . . . why not doing an OS module that performs an CRC check and make sure that the OS APIs have not been modified?
Well . . . this too can be modified not to include the file that you infected in the first place.
So . . . why not making OSs "unmodifiable".
Well . . . how would you then install it in the first place? (that is pretty much a modification) or install security updates? (that's another modification).
So . . . Well . . . ad infinutum.
I think I made my point.
Anyways, the bottom line is that you can only do all those modifications *if* you have privileges to modify system files. You have to have "root" access for that. So once you have broken the security of an OS to the point where your virus can modify OS system files, you are pretty much doomed.
Ideally, the solution is a secure operating system, where regularly you run your user programs with an account whose privileges do not include modifying OS files and any processes that you start cannot breach that security (again *ideally*). You would only use the root account to do OS installs and updates (if the virus gets you while you are at it, you are doomed again, so shut down AIM!).
That's why Windows is so dangerous, because the normal XP user is running with an Administrator account (similar to having root privileges), so any application that is infected can potentially cause a root-level infection.
And then, no matter how much you program securely, the missing piece as usual is education. At some point, even in the ideal OS, the user would have to log in with the root account to do OS changes or at least explicitly authorize in some manual way the modification of system files (that would be my choice just to make things easier to learn for everyone in the real world).
WARNING: I suspect that it only works with substances that are do not have strong physical addiction components. I wouldn't know anything about that since I have never consumed them.
The example in my life has been smoking. I used to smoke a pack a day. I tried to quit many times but then I would light one cigarette after months and would be back at one pack a day overnight.
On my latest attempt, I just decided that I love smoking and would like to continue smoking for years. Solution: cut back to one cigarette a day. It has been working incredibly for over 4 years now!!!
The most amazing thing is that I can't smoke more than 3 cigarettes in one day, my body just can't tolerate it. The key here is that for my brain, smoking one cigarette does not mean smoking 30 cigarettes anymore.
But that theory goes head to head with the traditional protestant morale: substances are bad, they are evil, and once you get them in your system, they control you (evil is something separated from the human nature that can go inside or outside of you, like a spirit).
Since the American culture is based on that morale, those ideas are pervasive in the US. Some psychologists have suggested that the American cultural myths about addictive substances reinforce addictive behaviors, i.e. the substance controls me, so if I take one drink I can't help drinking the whole bottle/smoke the whole pack.
Of course the American "experts" will say what you are saying is very dangerous, the first step is to accept that you have an alcoholism/tabaquism/whatever problem . . . blah blah blah.
But take a look at Europe and how Alcohol is not considered such an evil in a lot of countries. Italians take wine with meals, even in workdays. In the US, if you take two drinks, you are supposed to do something stupid. So you do in a lot of cases.
Bottom line: a lot of substances are not that evil. They cannot control you, the better way to kill addictions is to reduce intake to a minimum and then your brain will be retrained to take these small dosages normally.
After reading this article, not only I think that smoking my one cigarette a day is nice, but I think that it is actually way a better method to prevent me from going back to one pack a day than not smoking at all.
Different areas should have boards that assign ownership of the pages to individuals that request ownership of the pages. Again, those committees can be chosen on the basis of merit by the wikiepdia guys. The members of these boards have the merit of being in the boards.
But what does it mean to own a page? the page is locked and you have to approve anything before it is published?
No, that is really not necessary. Simply your friggin name appears on top. So if the information below is wrong, you are ridiculed.
Wikipedia has become very important, too important. People are going to be interested in having their name associated with it.
Hell, I'd love to be the editor of the Java entry in Wikipedia. I'd love to have that in my resume. Or better yet, be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the CS pages.
Wouldn't you like to be the editor of the Klingon page? or be in the board that decides who gets ownership of the Sci Fi pages?
This is technically easy to implement, it would all work free and people who are controlling the quality of the information in the pages would receive credit for it.
You would have the most important element in quality assurance: someone to blame if there is a quality problem.
Then the little guys will have to fund their own patent defense. The big guys have a clear edge here because they have more resources.
They already have the ability to do that in a litigation case, but this gives them the ability to do it preemptively. That last word is becoming increasingly popular.
How about webapp debugging?. Using the old Forte (I dunno how they call it now), which was NetBeans based, I could step through my servlet code. I cannot do that in Eclipse, partly because it has no servlet engine in it.
There must be something better out there. Am I missing some webapp debug tool for Eclipse?
Another thing: I loved the Search/Highlight feature (like the google bar). I think that this is fundamental for OO programming: you search for an object identifier in a piece of code and then you are able to quickly look at all the methods that are called on that object so you get an immediate feeling of what the code is doing to manipulate the object. Ecplise does not have that.
But it works, so I am using Eclipse.
As for the question: noup, NB is not eclipsing anything. It was about to eclipse Eclipse but it crashed yet another time and missed its chance.
There is a lot of internet phone companies outthere (Vonage, Net2Phone). I want to get an Internet telephone in my home this month. Which one should I choose?, what is you experience with these different services?
I know, it is phony anyways. If I have a connection to google that is much slower than the connection to the real page's server, then I may actually waste time by getting the page from google as opposed to the orig server.
The larger your proxy is, the more probabilities you have of finding that page that you are looking for in the proxy's cache.
Google has a tremendous amount of cached pages and images.
That's where the real gain comes from.
Plus, the trad proxys that I know do not compress. I don't know how relevant this is because for the most part, web pages' heavy stuff is not text but images that are already compressed. Still, this will save you some time.
Then keep in mind that the google servers are probably faster than other servers and more resistant to slashdot-and-the-likes web tsunamis.
Maybe this is it; it surely looks like it. They are certainly preparing the legal grounds to do so. They will get there sooner or later because they just have the power to do so. At some point they will start suing either the developers, the open source software distributing companies or the users; or of course, all of the above.
In our little slashdotian world, behind our glasses and our computer screens, we feel powerful. And we have the naive belief that because we the mosquitoes have been able to cause the giants a little pain or because some of the giants have directed the little power we have against other giants we really have power. Our power is completely overestimated by our community.
This is just the software developers version of the American myth that the little guy has a chance against the big guys. Bullshit. The little guy always looses, except for the one or two cases that the powerful people publicize to their convenience to pacify us with the illusion that we live in a system in which we can get justice if we fight nicely; that is, within the rules of a game where we are at a complete disadvantage.
The exception to this rule comes only when the little guys come together and fight together, like in the fight for civil rights or the huge strikes during the 20's and 30's that forced the ruling class to institute the social security system (no liberals, it was not because Roosevelt was a visionary or a hero or a nice guy, it was because they were forced to do so by the pressure of the masses).
So the bottom line is political power. How are we in that area? not even at zero. We are further behind zero because we have the illusion that we have a voice here in slashdot and in other blogs. Bullshit. Nobody cares about this. Nobody reads this. The larger society looks at us as freaks. Yes, they all believe that hackers are closer to Saddam than to Robin Hood.
We can't gather 20 guys to go out on the street to protest anything. Look at the women's march for the right to choose last year. That's how you demand something. And even that way it is very hard (I am not saying that the demand was right or wrong, I am just talking about the tactics).
Open source is just like PC software piracy during the eighties. Everybody said "it's too extended, they are not going to go after all that people". Blah blah blah. They did start going after everyone. They let that go on as long as it was convenient for them, it continued for a while when it was not a big problem for them and then, when it as not in their interests they started shooting.
In the bigger scheme of things, Open Source does not exist. The only way that something like this counts is if we struggle for this in a wider political perspective. And that ain't gonna happen.
At least not behind our keyboards.
Personally, I am not upgrading my 2 megapixel camera. I like taking photos all the time and I thought about getting a slim digital camera because I hate carrying around my bulky camera, but I would feel ridiculous carrying around the camera and the phone. The key is that I really need to carry it, so I don't want to carry separate devices.
I am more interested in the memory stuff than in the mp3s, but if you have memory in a device that generates sound, it should have some jack to plug-in my headphones and just listen. Come on!
I don't consider it a big deal, this is something that should simply work in such a device.
This may be new (it looks like it isn't) but in any case, you can just see that convergence is around the corner and it does not make sense to spend money in a device like this. . .
So, I won't buy another cellular until it telerports me.
The image that this woman is describing of a blogger is preety extreme and bogus. Sure, I read Slashdot, I read some comments and I post some comments. Period. I don't consider myself a blogger. I also watch TV, read books, the NYT and listen to the radio. None of these media by themselves would accurately describe my life. Nor they are my only source of knowledge (by all means!).
I don't think that most of the people around here devote their lives to blogging. If you work at slashdot, or you are an editor (I don't know how that works) you would be considered a "pro" blogger. Big deal. Any profession confines you to an area of specialization, I don't think that this is particularly harmful in that respect. Even in this case I'm preety sure that is better than people that dedicate their lives to cat shows as far as intellectual development goes.
If this is all you read, this is all you write and if you think that you are changing the world by ranting about MS in this forum, yes, you are a /. blogger and the description of this woman may very well fit you.
I remember talking once to a person of a numerically unimportant religion, considered to be a little crazy. She said to me: yes, there are some people like that, but for some reason, people tend to identify us with the most exaggerate ones; they are a minority in our group and they don't run the show.
True bloggers are a tiny minority, not representative of the crowd.
- # -
You my friend have become a caricature of your own people. And now, everybody thinks that they are all like you.
That's because the only way to go here is up. If this was worse, the only way to go would be to subdivide it in 6 pieces and put it as an obscure series in the Sci-Fi channel late at night after the X-Files reruns. It wouldn't be a movie, it would be a lame 2 hour sci-fi soap opera.
The man with the badge just finished to surround the movies with police tape. There was blood everywhere. He grabbed the bullhorn and shouted: there's nothing to see here people, move on.
This is a proof that reading the help system is really important, almost as important as reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper. declared S. Baldmir, CEO of the transilvania-based software giant.
I'm really happy about this, it was a nightmare having to number the pages one by one declared F. Drakul, a 48 year old gravedigger. I also found in their help system a letter written by grandmother to her lover (as it turns out, I apparently have chinese blood), a couple of passwords for porn-sites and the cellular telephone number of Paris Hilton. concluded the man as he proudly displayed his coffee-stained teeth with huge smile.
The idea behind this article is absolutely ridiculous. Why would anyone think that you can reproduce the way that people solve problems by talking to them?
This is the formula:
A "normal" intelligent person can explain how he solves a problem.
You interview them.
You learn how they do it and then reproduce it.
Bullshit.
So:
I interview Donald Knuth and ask him how he came up with all his shit.
I copy it and become at least a good problem solver as him.
I interview Fermat too (this is all bullshit anyways so I have a time machine).
I become as good as the both of them combined, now I just need to read enough material.
As I said bullshit.
We have no idea about how we solve problems. How do you know 2+2=4? mmmm. ooohhhh..... I seee the figure of a number 2 and another number 2 and a plus sign and the fat ass of my first grade teacher and then. . . it all comes together.
Try asking your computer how it solves problems.
Here's another angle: we've been trying to do that in AI for decades and very few interesting things came up. On the great majority of them it is highly questionable that the intelligent program solves its problem the way we do.
We are not designed to explain how we solve the problems that we solve. If a Savant can communicate with us he will be as clueless as we are with regards to the mechanisms that he uses to solve his problems.
I concurr. Actually, I *am* one of those who has not made the switch because of this.
I knowwwwwwwwwww. It's wrong, but many people had my old hotmail address.
Ok, there's no escape now. I've been dragging this for over 10 years. I'll just have to register my domain now.
1. I strongly disagree with Theo's actions: he shouldn't have taken the money in the first place.
Yes, I know what you're thinking: it is stupid not to take money.
Ever heard about a guy called Fausto?
(the one who sold his soul to Bill G...oops sorry, the Devil).
Don't ever work with or funded by an organization with whom you have major ethical differences. I'm not talking about minor stuff, I'm talking about big differences. In this case there were obviously huge disagreements.
Make a stand for what you believe in.
2. Dude: about your comment, it is obvious that you don't really believe in freedom of speech. Government repression is not the only repression it is just one in an array (java.util.ArrayList, not String[n]) of repression techniques. We have seen a lot of that lately.
The law is not the only parameter. What is happening with the restrain of freedom of speech is plain wrong, it is simply shameful.
Do you really believe in freedom of speech or not?. As a value I mean, not as a law. I'm talking about right and wrong here, not about legal or illegal.
Remember about right and wrong? they came to the world long before law.
Shame on all of you who believe in lynching socially, politically and/or economically those who dissent with the war and then go blah blah blah about the "freedom" that dissenters have because they don't go to jail for their thoughts.