As the OP notes, the primary use would be to create interactive displays and signs in places where there typically is no mouse, or it would be inadvisable to place a mouse (or other pointing device).
The idea is to enable people to use a device that many of them already carry with them to interact with these displays, rather than building some possibly expensive or damage prone method of interaction into the display itself.
That's not how I read the article's proposal at all!
The code you've been asked to maintain is stored in some standard machine readable format. When you come in you then use the code-editor program to view it using -your- extensions, and the underlying primatives of the code objects are presented in the manner you're used to.
Whatever extensions and transformations the original author used to create the code would be relatively meaningless, which (for many of the reasons you descibe) is a good thing.
That's exactly one of the author's points! You shouldn't (and in his vision won't) have to deal with the XML directly, -unless- you are one of the people actually writing new plugins rather than just using them.
His suggestion is primarily that we start using editors that transparently present the 'code file' in our choice of format rather than forcing us to edit it byte-by-byte. It's like the syntax-highlighting you probably use now, only effecting more than just colors.
Using XML for the underlying syntax is mostly irrelevant to his proposal, but he suggests it merely because it is currently popular, well suppoerted, and well suited to it's primary job of presenting data in an easily MACHINE READABLE format.
His proposal is, in fact, exactly the opposite of requiring coders to pop open a hex editor, and he likens our current ASCII-only coding methods to doing exactly that at one point.
Don't post from a position of ignorance
on
Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 1
"There's a very limited degree of skill involved"
Do you have any evidence or support for this statement? As evidence that there is indeed skill involved, consider the tournaments referenced in the post, and the extremely disproportionate number of 'professional players' finishing well. One might consider the fact that professional players can exist at all to be good evidence that, especially over the long term, skill predominates over luck.
One of the more interesting aspects to poker, IMO, is the number of different layers of strategy involved. * There's knowing the odds of your hand coming out on top, given the information you are aware of. * There's how those odds compare with how much is in the pot compared to how much you'd need to bet. * There's knowing how to change your play based on table position. * There's knowing how to change your play based on chip position. * Then there's the whole psychological game of both trying to read your opponent's motives while simultaneously attempting to mask or misrepresent your own. Being able to consistantly bluff and steal hands that your cards would not have won is often considered one of the hallmarks of a skilled player.
Yes, for any one given hand of poker, "luck" (ie: randomness) will often prevail, but over the long (or even medium) term, the skill of the players involved far outweighs the moment to moment randomness.
I play poker regularly, usually with friends, and always for enough money that we take it seriously.
Point taken on voters over citizens, although your numbers exaggerate things somewhat. 67% of registered voters actually voted in 2000, representing just over 51% of the entire estimated voting-age population. That doesn't quite make "substantially less than half"... (Reference)
In the main, however, I disagree that it's pointless, even if it could also have been applied to Gore.
The point was that it is incorrect to assume that, just because America elects it's leaders, the majority of voters support the current leader (or that it's likely that any particular individual does). That's regardless of the current White House inhabitant.
The secondary point was that, in this case, it's even more relevant because usually the President who is elected at least receives more popular votes than their closest adversary, while the 2000 election was one of those rare cases where this did not occur. Thus the likelihood of any particular individual having voted for Bush is even lower than for almost any other president to date.
I think he meant to refer to the case when you have -fewer- guests coming, or when you want to take that industrial 'serves 12' recipe and scale it back to serve only 4.
I was about to say roughly the same thing... it wasn't the anthropomorphization that put people off, but what the little bastards would say and do.
However, it is important to note (and is consistant with the articles) that because they -were- anthroporphized, they provided a clearer target for our frustration than a simple pop-up window does.
What might have saved clippy is if they added a feature where the user could, Black&White style, pimp slap him upside the head whenever he did something aggravating and proceeded to grin at you about it. At least then we'd feel some emotional resolution to the frustrations these programs often cause rather than just having to stare at another box asking you to accept something you don't like or want by clicking 'ok'.
Since you brought the rodents in question, they are clearly your allies, or at worst non-combatants.
Whirlwind clearly states that you only get one attack per "opponent" within reach...
As a DM I'll happily reward (or at least play out to it's logical conclusion) creative *in-game* thinking, but take an equally dim view of exploitatively "creative" *meta-game* thinking. You should be there to have some fun with your friends, after all, not to come up with rules-lawyer applications to make the game not be fun anymore.
"Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races."
More likely you'll be on the fast track to a dead familiar.
I've played every version of this particular game, starting about 18 years ago. Like many gamers, I have an insatiable tendency to want to 'tweak' game systems to make them 'better', and every system always has at least several features I find slightly annoying. 3.0/3.5 is, in my opinion, without question the best balanced version ever made.
Sure people can and will try to come up with 'killer combinations' (like the OP), but in almost all cases I've found that they're either reading the rules wrong, or have overlooked something.
JPEG can be lossless compression, depending on what settings you use. Just because it's -normally- run in a lossy mode doesn't mean that it has to be.
Re:excellent! i have been looking for this
on
Samba 3 By Example
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· Score: 1
I think the OP was making a snide comment on the fact that the docs just say to 'look at' the hosts allow option, but don't specifically say to change it one way or another.
He physically "looked at" the option, as instructed, and it unsurprisingly had no effect on server operations.
Personally, I love using samba as a PDC. With the addition of some decent web pages for LDAP user and group maintainance, it becomes a very slick, well-unified system. I haven't plunged into the world of printer sharing yet, but it's on the list...
Maybe it's me, but that oft-cited suggestion has always seemed a little odd. I can see where a new operating system might require new hardware, but why should a new operating system require old hardware? And if the hardware was to blame, how could XP handle it out of the box, with no special drivers or setup?
A new operating system requires old hardware when it has not yet finished coding support for the -new- hardware. Old hardware is often (unless maliciously obsoleted) -more- likely to work properly out of the box because all the OS people have had more time to get the drivers working properly.
So why does Windows already work with the latest hardware when these 'other' OSs don't? Because hardware vendors consider (and rightly so) MS support to be crucial to their sales, and thus make sure that the boys from Redmond always get early NDA access to any new hardware.
It makes sense just fine, when you think about it.
Much like The Enquirer's news is not the same as that of The New York Times (your choice to which you prefer), not all web-based news providers are the same.
Some focus on humor and amusement, some on getting news out fast, and some on getting the facts as straight as possible (Groklaw is one of the better current examples of the latter, but many of the good hardware review sites also fall into this category.)
Readers will gravitate to the news styles they want, regardless of medium.
There are web-based news outlets that focus on facts and the verification thereof.
"I personnaly dont think it's possible to create a motor with only magnets as a power source."
I presume you mean 'only -permanent- magnets', as electromagnetic motors are cheap and plentiful.
I still can't get through to the article, sadly. The initial claim of it just being a much more efficient motor seemed perfectly reasonable, but I can't visualize it from the patent apps, or get the images to load. What I -thought- was being claimed is: * In most contemporary electric motors, you put in N units of electrical energy, but only get N*.50 or so units of useful physical energy back out, the rest being lost to friction, heat, and other less useful ends. * In this nifty design, internal forces help to cancel friction and result in a motor where it's possible to get N*.80 of physical work out.
It's still questionable, but at least it's not 'magic energy from nowhere'.
"Potential energy is not real energy (otherwise every single metal thing in the universe would have all of this energy corresponding to every magnet in existence)."
Actually, every ferrous object in the universe does have a (usually very small) force being applied to it from every magnet in the universe.
Similarly, every mass in the universe is *right now* exerting a gravitational pull on every other mass. Most of them are so small as to be insignificant, of course.
In both cases, because of those forces, the "potential energy" (in this case it's perhaps more accurate to say "positional energy") of your object can be lowered by moving it closer to the magnet or large mass. That change in energy can be used to do work, like acceleration.
All energy is real.
"I have a magnet which I had when I was little, and it is now much weaker."
This is a completely different effect, related more to entropy than to the expenditure of energy. (See below.)
"Magnetism is an effect of small electric currents within the magnet; doesn't it stand to reason that when the magnet is used, it could lose power by disturbing some of those currents?"
Not really. In the case of most permanent magnets the 'current' is really just a single electron circling it's atom. A noticeable magnetic effect comes when all the spinning electrons line up and all their infitessimal little contributions add together instead of canceling each other out. Naturally magnetic materials have the spins 'locked down' through various low-level physical and chemical mechanisms.
This is why you can 'magnetize' a nail or needle by rubbing it on a magnet... the magnetic field will (temporarily) align the spins within the needle. Eventually, however, without some mechanism to lock those atoms in place relative to each other, the spins will wander off alignment and the magnetism of the needle will fade.
He didn't say 'require unmemorizeable passwords', just 'require passwords with characteristics that make them difficult to crack'.
An excellent point, however, that that standard 1337 letter-number substitutions do basically nothing to improve your password security, as any half-decent password cracker will try those substitutions early in a dictionary attack.
I recommend the use of symbols where appropriate (throwing a !, ^ or & into your password won't hurt) and taking the time to try to pick a good password -that you can remember-. Playing the 'license plate game' or using phrases or mnemonics can be a good way to generate memorable yet difficult passwords.
Example 1: "h8red&NV" (hatred and envy) Example 2: "9.8m/s/s" (g) Example 3: "wm$ihaBp" (with more money, I'd have a better password) Example 4: "qP*&^%Zm" (letters from the four corners of a qwerty keyboard, with shifted '8765' in the middle... try it, it types surprisingly easily)
I'd actually argue that having all services turned off by default doesn't impact the "average dumb user's" useability experience at all, because the average dumb user utilizes their system pretty much exclusively as a client.
This is part of why home-NAT devices were able to spread so quickly among regular home users... because they don't care if their system can be accessed via ssh, http, or whatever... as long as they can access other systems in the expected fashion.
...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client.
Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.
It's primarily only MS that keeps insisting that different functionality needs to all get sucked into a single monolithic 'suite' (which then gets sucked into the OS)...
"If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it."
Only if they can find out that you are the copyright holder and if they can also find out how to contact you.
The problem that this is trying to address is the thousands of works that currently cannot legally be archived or utilized due to the near-prohibitive cost of trying to research who (if anyone) is the proper person to contact.
"If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it."
I don't see how this sentence makes any sense at all. If you are required to register your copyright, or to include some useful copyright notice with the original, it merely gives would be (re)users a standard way to determine that you are the copyright holder they need to talk to. You don't lose anything...
These fears may be misplaced, but I'd like someone to address them.
IIRC, the way it worked previously there were several ways to assert your copyright on a given work, including:
Registering it with the appropriate authority.
Placing a correct copyright notice on the document or work itself.
That latter option should be easy for any serious publisher to abide by...
In any case, it seems fairly unlikely that we'd implement an up-front registration process. More likely (as the article mentions) works would continue to be automagically copyrighted for some (smallish) number of years, with a minimal renewal fee you'd need to submit at that point to extend your copyright to the full term.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why use your cellphone as a mouse?"
As the OP notes, the primary use would be to create interactive displays and signs in places where there typically is no mouse, or it would be inadvisable to place a mouse (or other pointing device).
The idea is to enable people to use a device that many of them already carry with them to interact with these displays, rather than building some possibly expensive or damage prone method of interaction into the display itself.
Does that mean we'll all be using Perl6?
[It does appear to be one of the few languages being developed with a strong DWIM focus...]
That's not how I read the article's proposal at all!
The code you've been asked to maintain is stored in some standard machine readable format. When you come in you then use the code-editor program to view it using -your- extensions, and the underlying primatives of the code objects are presented in the manner you're used to.
Whatever extensions and transformations the original author used to create the code would be relatively meaningless, which (for many of the reasons you descibe) is a good thing.
That's exactly one of the author's points! You shouldn't (and in his vision won't) have to deal with the XML directly, -unless- you are one of the people actually writing new plugins rather than just using them.
His suggestion is primarily that we start using editors that transparently present the 'code file' in our choice of format rather than forcing us to edit it byte-by-byte. It's like the syntax-highlighting you probably use now, only effecting more than just colors.
Using XML for the underlying syntax is mostly irrelevant to his proposal, but he suggests it merely because it is currently popular, well suppoerted, and well suited to it's primary job of presenting data in an easily MACHINE READABLE format.
His proposal is, in fact, exactly the opposite of requiring coders to pop open a hex editor, and he likens our current ASCII-only coding methods to doing exactly that at one point.
"There's a very limited degree of skill involved"
Do you have any evidence or support for this statement? As evidence that there is indeed skill involved, consider the tournaments referenced in the post, and the extremely disproportionate number of 'professional players' finishing well. One might consider the fact that professional players can exist at all to be good evidence that, especially over the long term, skill predominates over luck.
One of the more interesting aspects to poker, IMO, is the number of different layers of strategy involved.
* There's knowing the odds of your hand coming out on top, given the information you are aware of.
* There's how those odds compare with how much is in the pot compared to how much you'd need to bet.
* There's knowing how to change your play based on table position.
* There's knowing how to change your play based on chip position.
* Then there's the whole psychological game of both trying to read your opponent's motives while simultaneously attempting to mask or misrepresent your own. Being able to consistantly bluff and steal hands that your cards would not have won is often considered one of the hallmarks of a skilled player.
Yes, for any one given hand of poker, "luck" (ie: randomness) will often prevail, but over the long (or even medium) term, the skill of the players involved far outweighs the moment to moment randomness.
I play poker regularly, usually with friends, and always for enough money that we take it seriously.
Indeed. Fedora offers similar support for reading and burning -data- DVDs. What won't be included is software for playing DVD movies (see also DeCSS).
In Fedora, you should use 'dvdrecord' rather than 'cdrecord' for burning data DVDs, incidently. I don't know about SuSE...
I think a more accurate caveat is this:
A free (gratis) OS distribution can NOT legally include mp3 or dvd support.
Windows -can- only because they charge you a bucket of money and use some of that money to pay off the appropriate license fees for that copy.
So it's not that it's not Windows... it's that it's free.
Point taken on voters over citizens, although your numbers exaggerate things somewhat. 67% of registered voters actually voted in 2000, representing just over 51% of the entire estimated voting-age population. That doesn't quite make "substantially less than half"... (Reference)
In the main, however, I disagree that it's pointless, even if it could also have been applied to Gore.
The point was that it is incorrect to assume that, just because America elects it's leaders, the majority of voters support the current leader (or that it's likely that any particular individual does). That's regardless of the current White House inhabitant.
The secondary point was that, in this case, it's even more relevant because usually the President who is elected at least receives more popular votes than their closest adversary, while the 2000 election was one of those rare cases where this did not occur. Thus the likelihood of any particular individual having voted for Bush is even lower than for almost any other president to date.
...more people voted for Gore in 2000 than voted for Bush (at least according to the sources I've found, like here)
That means that -most- citizens of the United States would have preferred to have a different leader...
I think he meant to refer to the case when you have -fewer- guests coming, or when you want to take that industrial 'serves 12' recipe and scale it back to serve only 4.
I was about to say roughly the same thing... it wasn't the anthropomorphization that put people off, but what the little bastards would say and do.
However, it is important to note (and is consistant with the articles) that because they -were- anthroporphized, they provided a clearer target for our frustration than a simple pop-up window does.
What might have saved clippy is if they added a feature where the user could, Black&White style, pimp slap him upside the head whenever he did something aggravating and proceeded to grin at you about it. At least then we'd feel some emotional resolution to the frustrations these programs often cause rather than just having to stare at another box asking you to accept something you don't like or want by clicking 'ok'.
Since you brought the rodents in question, they are clearly your allies, or at worst non-combatants.
Whirlwind clearly states that you only get one attack per "opponent" within reach...
As a DM I'll happily reward (or at least play out to it's logical conclusion) creative *in-game* thinking, but take an equally dim view of exploitatively "creative" *meta-game* thinking. You should be there to have some fun with your friends, after all, not to come up with rules-lawyer applications to make the game not be fun anymore.
"Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races."
More likely you'll be on the fast track to a dead familiar.
I've played every version of this particular game, starting about 18 years ago. Like many gamers, I have an insatiable tendency to want to 'tweak' game systems to make them 'better', and every system always has at least several features I find slightly annoying. 3.0/3.5 is, in my opinion, without question the best balanced version ever made.
Sure people can and will try to come up with 'killer combinations' (like the OP), but in almost all cases I've found that they're either reading the rules wrong, or have overlooked something.
JPEG can be lossless compression, depending on what settings you use.
Just because it's -normally- run in a lossy mode doesn't mean that it has to be.
I think the OP was making a snide comment on the fact that the docs just say to 'look at' the hosts allow option, but don't specifically say to change it one way or another.
He physically "looked at" the option, as instructed, and it unsurprisingly had no effect on server operations.
Personally, I love using samba as a PDC. With the addition of some decent web pages for LDAP user and group maintainance, it becomes a very slick, well-unified system. I haven't plunged into the world of printer sharing yet, but it's on the list...
A new operating system requires old hardware when it has not yet finished coding support for the -new- hardware. Old hardware is often (unless maliciously obsoleted) -more- likely to work properly out of the box because all the OS people have had more time to get the drivers working properly.
So why does Windows already work with the latest hardware when these 'other' OSs don't? Because hardware vendors consider (and rightly so) MS support to be crucial to their sales, and thus make sure that the boys from Redmond always get early NDA access to any new hardware.
It makes sense just fine, when you think about it.
Much like The Enquirer's news is not the same as that of The New York Times (your choice to which you prefer), not all web-based news providers are the same.
Some focus on humor and amusement, some on getting news out fast, and some on getting the facts as straight as possible (Groklaw is one of the better current examples of the latter, but many of the good hardware review sites also fall into this category.)
"I personnaly dont think it's possible to create a motor with only magnets as a power source."
I presume you mean 'only -permanent- magnets', as electromagnetic motors are cheap and plentiful.
I still can't get through to the article, sadly. The initial claim of it just being a much more efficient motor seemed perfectly reasonable, but I can't visualize it from the patent apps, or get the images to load. What I -thought- was being claimed is:
* In most contemporary electric motors, you put in N units of electrical energy, but only get N*.50 or so units of useful physical energy back out, the rest being lost to friction, heat, and other less useful ends.
* In this nifty design, internal forces help to cancel friction and result in a motor where it's possible to get N*.80 of physical work out.
It's still questionable, but at least it's not 'magic energy from nowhere'.
"Potential energy is not real energy (otherwise every single metal thing in the universe would have all of this energy corresponding to every magnet in existence)."
Actually, every ferrous object in the universe does have a (usually very small) force being applied to it from every magnet in the universe.
Similarly, every mass in the universe is *right now* exerting a gravitational pull on every other mass. Most of them are so small as to be insignificant, of course.
In both cases, because of those forces, the "potential energy" (in this case it's perhaps more accurate to say "positional energy") of your object can be lowered by moving it closer to the magnet or large mass. That change in energy can be used to do work, like acceleration.
All energy is real.
"I have a magnet which I had when I was little, and it is now much weaker."
This is a completely different effect, related more to entropy than to the expenditure of energy. (See below.)
"Magnetism is an effect of small electric currents within the magnet; doesn't it stand to reason that when the magnet is used, it could lose power by disturbing some of those currents?"
Not really. In the case of most permanent magnets the 'current' is really just a single electron circling it's atom. A noticeable magnetic effect comes when all the spinning electrons line up and all their infitessimal little contributions add together instead of canceling each other out. Naturally magnetic materials have the spins 'locked down' through various low-level physical and chemical mechanisms.
This is why you can 'magnetize' a nail or needle by rubbing it on a magnet... the magnetic field will (temporarily) align the spins within the needle. Eventually, however, without some mechanism to lock those atoms in place relative to each other, the spins will wander off alignment and the magnetism of the needle will fade.
This is all true, but the parent was making no such claims.
The patent applications must explain how the device works, such that they could be used to replicate it.
Therefore, if you want to figure out how (or if) this works... studying the patent applications is a good place to start.
He didn't say 'require unmemorizeable passwords', just 'require passwords with characteristics that make them difficult to crack'.
An excellent point, however, that that standard 1337 letter-number substitutions do basically nothing to improve your password security, as any half-decent password cracker will try those substitutions early in a dictionary attack.
I recommend the use of symbols where appropriate (throwing a !, ^ or & into your password won't hurt) and taking the time to try to pick a good password -that you can remember-. Playing the 'license plate game' or using phrases or mnemonics can be a good way to generate memorable yet difficult passwords.
Example 1: "h8red&NV" (hatred and envy)
Example 2: "9.8m/s/s" (g)
Example 3: "wm$ihaBp" (with more money, I'd have a better password)
Example 4: "qP*&^%Zm" (letters from the four corners of a qwerty keyboard, with shifted '8765' in the middle... try it, it types surprisingly easily)
WARNING: DO NOT USE ANY OF THESE EXAMPLES AS IS.
I'd actually argue that having all services turned off by default doesn't impact the "average dumb user's" useability experience at all, because the average dumb user utilizes their system pretty much exclusively as a client.
This is part of why home-NAT devices were able to spread so quickly among regular home users... because they don't care if their system can be accessed via ssh, http, or whatever... as long as they can access other systems in the expected fashion.
Still, a nice observation (once corrected).
...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client.
Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.
It's primarily only MS that keeps insisting that different functionality needs to all get sucked into a single monolithic 'suite' (which then gets sucked into the OS)...
You seem to have a few misconceptions.
"If they want to use my work, then I can grant them the rights to use it."
Only if they can find out that you are the copyright holder and if they can also find out how to contact you.
The problem that this is trying to address is the thousands of works that currently cannot legally be archived or utilized due to the near-prohibitive cost of trying to research who (if anyone) is the proper person to contact.
"If I am required to register my copyright, then I lose some of the ability to protect it."
I don't see how this sentence makes any sense at all. If you are required to register your copyright, or to include some useful copyright notice with the original, it merely gives would be (re)users a standard way to determine that you are the copyright holder they need to talk to. You don't lose anything...
IIRC, the way it worked previously there were several ways to assert your copyright on a given work, including:
That latter option should be easy for any serious publisher to abide by...
In any case, it seems fairly unlikely that we'd implement an up-front registration process. More likely (as the article mentions) works would continue to be automagically copyrighted for some (smallish) number of years, with a minimal renewal fee you'd need to submit at that point to extend your copyright to the full term.