>Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing
>jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business..
>With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest
>efficiency..
That's not at all clear.
Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to us to decide what that means. (And maximizing profit for investors by any means sure isn't what I'd call public good.) Even private companies depend on their community for the infrastructure that allows them to exist. It doesn't seem unreasonable to require that they also operate in a way that benefits that community.
Ellipses rarely make for a sound argument.
. . . give IDL a try. It's very expensive - several thousand for a personal license. But, you campus may have some network licenses you can use. Try asking someone in astronomy or physics, or possibly geo.
I'm a huge open source fan, and it really riles me to have to use proprietary software, but it's hard to match what IDL can do. With a little practice you can go from raw data to publication quality plots in a staggeringly short period of time.
So far I've yet to find anything close in the open source world. PerlDL + pgplot is the best contender. The authors seem to be very careful to do things properly and a lot of the functions one needs are already available. But the documentation is a great steaming pile of beetle dung and it's almost impossible for a new person to get started, and they don't (yet?) seem to have some of nifty multi-dimensional array processing features that IDL offers.
If anyone knows of a good alternative, I'd love to hear about it! I'll be watching this thread in the hope that there's a project out there somewhere that's slipped through the cracks.
I agree - the use of the new device at the end was quite well done, and fit in well with the Adams material.
But - why the hell did they have to go and ruin it with the silly dialog and the "I'm a woman" joke after they recover the device? Tossing in a totally artificial punchline joke ruined the whole scene. My row in the theater (of Adams' loving geeks) groaned and looked around at each other in disbelief at that line, and the theater (which was full of laughs and cheers most of the time) was dead silent. Placing punch line jokes into a film hasn't worked since the Marx Brothers. (And no, there wasn't any sort of deep cynical meta-humor attached to the joke. It was delivered straight, and treated as sincere dialog. It was just awful.)
The film had some entertaining moments - and not all of them were true to Adams' work. The Malkovich sermon was quite well orchestrated. Marvin was played with perfection. The scenes of workmen building Earth were beautifully carried off. What Ford and Arthur turn into when they get picked up by the Heart of Gold is new, but it worked fine and captured essence of the book passage in a much shorter amount of time than would have been required for the original scene.
And some of the characters were faithful. Slartibartfast came off beautifully, even if one of his greatest lines was burried in a distracting fast paced edit. Trillian was believable. Marvin was great.
On the whole, though, I have to agree with MJ Simpson. The movie failed miserably to capture any of the magic in previous renditions of the guide, and for reasons that were entirely preventable. The humor was exaggerated and dumb gags (the lemon squeezer, the fly swatters) replaced truly funny dialog. Zaphod captured none of the qualities of the Adams' character. He was a clown, and not even an entertaining clown. The romance addition could have been okay, but they made things far too obvious to be interesting and wasted minutes of dialog explaining the obvious.
That assumes the users are familiar with the DOS command prompt.
First of all, that doesn't describe the usual windows user, even among seemingly tech savy people. (Which, if you'll forgive a brief flame, is no surprise given the crippled and disgusting nature of the DOS shell... why would anyone use it for anything if they had a choice?)
Second, anyone who intuitively reaches for DOS commands will pick up a dozen unix commands in minutes. And, once they know the actual command, they'll instantly have access to man files and online help sources, and they'll be able to easily switch to a different unix machine without confusion. Just try a google search to find out to make the unix command "dir" sort by date. If you ask me, aliasing commands to totally different names is asking for trouble. At best, it will never be noticed by anyone. At worst, one will have a bunch of pissed off users a few weeks down the line.
Someone else in this thread suggested aliasing the dos commands to display help messages instead. That sounds like a very good idea!
echo 'Running the file ~/.bashrc. More information is available using the command "man bash"'
With similar notices in all the dot files.
As I recall one of the fist headaches I encountered when meeting unix was just trying to figure out which files were run when. We has both bash and csh stuff in the skeleton files, as well a all the other not-obviously irrelevant dot files that get generated over time. For a newbie, it's not at all obvious which files to fiddle with in order to make something happen.
A few other minor suggestions -
Document the dot files with excessive comments. It will help newbies get up to speed faster when they try to change something.
Adding a "-i" to aliases for all the dangerous commands is a good idea, if you ask me.
Adding a couple examples of aliases, $PATH modification, maybe an if statement, launching an xterm with some geometry and colors, and so on might be nice so people have something to get started on as they try to change their shell to their liking.
>In the meantime, You can still confirm someone's identity uniquely by the >transmissions of their passport -- Who they are needs to be determined >separately, but you don't need to decode an RFID to use it for tracking. > -- it's just a case of having a transmitter/reciever that's powerful > enough to get thru the passport's tinfoile hat.
A very good point.
How long do you think it will be before some police agency somewhere decides to scan the crowd at a street protest in order to make a table of known "trouble-makers?" Whether or not they can retrieve your name doesn't matter - they can get that from you later on.
Giving people a unique, broadcast ID may thwart some of the more obvious opportunities for identity theft, but it does nothing to address privacy concerns.
I'm not kidding. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a useful skill. Take the $50 you'd spend to get your unit repaired and spend the money on a used soldering iron and a shiny new tip instead.
Then (here's the important part) practice on stuff that you won't miss before you try repairing the drive. Raid your neighbor's garbage for old electronics and spend a few hours removing components, replacing them, tinning wires, etc.
Two nice online introductions to soldering (both originally produced by Nasa) are located here:
Or, if you really don't want to learn to solder, talk to your neighbors. See if there's a ham radio club in your neighborhood. Hunt for a radio/television repair shop. Drop by the electronics shop at your local community college. Or, chat up the guy selling refurbished electronics at the nearest swap-meet.
A determined employee will always be able to find a way to sneak information out of your door, and the more you irritate and harass your employees by treating them like children, the more likely it is they'll want to do so!
Let's say you manage to permanently disable all usb storage device drivers in the building, and every machine is in a padlocked cage and set up to trigger alarms if anyone tries to mess with the hardware, and you've got every network connection rigged to alarms so that no one can remove a cable and insert a recording device.
A determined thief will still find a way around it. Maybe they'll sneak in a digital camera and film a bunch of screen shots. (How long would it take to display all the code you care about at ten screens-full per second? Not long enough, I suspect.) Or maybe they'll create a hardware malfunction and use that as cover to get their hands on a hard drive or to insert a logger somewhere. Or maybe they'll take the most interesting bits, compress it, turn it into ascii, and print it in place of pages 51-74 of a new equipment manual before sneaking it out in their pockets. Or perhaps they'll just show up around midnight with bolt cutters and do it the low tech way.
Or, if your IP is really novel and interesting, they'll simply remember important parts and sell them to someone else willing to flush out the details in their own way.
Unless you've got brilliant and scrupulously honest security people and you're willing to make the lives of your employees miserable by passing them through metal detectors on the way in and out of the building, and every scrap of media in the office is locked up at all times before being securely destroyed, and none of your employees are ever permitted to send any material anywhere in any format, you're out of luck.
That isn't to say you shouldn't discourage people from removing material. Sternly telling them not to take a bit of work home with them on the weekend is one thing. But once you've made it clear that they're forbidden to do so, trying to outwit the determined thief is bound not only to fail, but also to irritate your trustworthy employees.
>IT IS one of the most famous, and most >embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, >astronomers discovered that the universe is >expanding at ever faster speeds.
Embarrassing? Since when is being able to study something qualitatively new and unexpected an embarrassment? One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)
If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, is a *real* embarrassment for physics - dozens of seemingly reputable scientists have spent millions of dollars and decades of work and produced diddly squat. The experimental case isn't bulletproof - it's just so riddled with holes that no one notices when new bullets pass through it. The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
One need only look at the popularity of web-mail applications to realize that there are a lot of people in the world who would probably jump on a system such as the one described.
But, that's *only* because their expectations have been driven into the ground by unbelievably slow and buggy local software.
The article says it all:
>Now, think about Gmail, which, >in a broadband situation >(I'll deal with that in a couple of >paragraphs), is probably more responsive >than Outlook.
It's true - gmail *is* faster than outlook, but that's only because outlook is shockingly slow. Neither one can compete against an efficient mail reader. For example, after a few minutes of practice, any mutt user can sort many tens of messages in the time it takes to retrieve a single page from gmail, even on a a pentium-I with a high speed university pipe.
Likewise, I claim the popularity of the buggy, featureless text editors built into browsers is a direct consequence of the buggy, featureless, and unendurably slow local word processors. Why don't browsers default to using external editors for filling in text fields? Because most people would end up using a terrible (if esthetically beautiful) editor anyway, and therefore don't see the difference.
That said, remote applications can work. They've been working for decades. I'm currently submitting this message from a computer at home on a modest DSL line, into which I am remotely logged in through two separate ssh tunnels. (Two, because of dumb firewall rules that I cannot control.) The latency is occasionally noticeable, but it's orders of magnitude faster than gmail.
There's no question that remote applications can run reasonably fast - so long as they only exchange text (or text like cues) and the display is stored locally, and so long as they don't require huge amounts of processing on the display side. But to do anything efficient in a browser will require a philosophical (rather than technological) revolution among browser designers and those who build web based applications. Hell, browsers themselves are among the slowest programs around. And as anyone who's tried to run a recent graphical browser on an old machine knows, moving applications to the browser certainly isn't going to save anyone CPU time.
Surely the decision to make one-time use of free software for performing a quantitative task in a non-professional environment ought to be made based on something other than whether it comes with super-nifty 3D shadowed buttons in your favorite candy-apple color.
I say, give those windows95ish program a try, and don't ask for alternatives until you've found them lacking in function rather than style.
Besides, just think of all the fun you can have with those extra cpu cycles that won't be wasted drawing pretty pictures around the border of your software.
I hope the mod-gods will allow a brief tangential rant.
My prediction: all the people who rip or purchase audio in lossy formats today will hate their decision in a few years. (The only exception is, of course, ripping audio destined solely for a portable player - which is a very different scenario from trying to archive audio in compressed formats.)
Sure - an mp3 file sounds pretty good, most of the time. It's stunning that it sounds as good as it does. But, it doesn't sound perfect.
Reasonable people may object that even with perfect hearing and a great pair of headphones, one would only notice a difference between a "lame --preset extreme" file and the original in one album out of a thousand. That's probably true. The same sure isn't true about a 128 cbr file, of the sort one can buy online from a dozen vendors for the same price as a CD - it isn't hard to find a track full of noticeable artifacts when made with the best encoder around. People who encode things are even lower rates ("because it's mostly speech anyway") really shouldn't have to wait around in order to hate themselves - there's plenty of reason to feel bad right now.
So, why not assume it's good enough and not worry? Here's the catch: the cost of archiving audio in a lossless format is very small today, and will become vanishingly small over the next few years. For something like 15 cents an album at the price of a hard drive (much less if you're archiving to dvd and you buy disks on sale), you can guarantee for all time that your audio will always be good enough. It will sound great on the headphone you're going to buy in five years, to the audiophile spouse you haven't yet met, and even when chopped up added to an audio mix when some radio station geek digs it out of an estate sale seventy five years from now.
In ten years, when the additional cost of storing your entire audio library in lossless format drops to the price of a meal, you'll hate yourself for not having done so. (Of course those of you silly enough to buy tracks with drm limits on the number of machines on which it can be played are going to hate yourselves much more, and probably somewhat sooner.)
Just think how annoying it is when you hear a recording of some great, lost radio program that was made on a consumer tape deck set to "long play." If you're anything like me, you curse the short sighted people who bargained away the future for the cost of a dollar cassette.
And don't assume that you can just run out and pick up a new copy of the album. Even within the mainstream music industry, there are countless lost albums whose masters have been destroyed, and many more which lie abandoned with no promise of a reprinting. There's no reason to believe things will be any different in the future.
Anyway - to be slightly more on topic - I agree, FLAC is great. Don't know of any exiting conversion utilities, however it would take more than a few dozen lines of perl to throw something together. There are command line tools to rip a cd, run a database lookup, and encode to most formats.
If you want to make it slighly less annoying, hit a pc junker store and pick up as many cheap old cdrom drives as you have IDE slots. That'll make the disk changing somewhat less annoying. (If you want to go nuts, pick up five 486 pc's, and fill them all with cd drives... that is, assuming spending a weekend setting up an automated super-ripper sounds like more fun than spending a weekend babysitting your cdrom drive.)
>Apparantly not and many others like him don't >get it either. Read the comments below and weep >for what once was/. home of the nerd/geek who >understood math jokes.
To be fair, though, we ought to recognize that as math jokes go, it's particularly badly constructed and not very funny. Understanding the joke in this case amounts to something rather like, "Oh - a nonsense formula which isn't even flushed out enough to be engaging. Guess it was meant to be a joke. Pity they didn't do more with it."
If one is going to go to the trouble of sending up a story in the papers, it's worth spending at least a few moments putting together something coherent. They could at least tell us what the formula is supposed to do (as written, it ain't a probability) and choose sane parameters. "Frequency" measured on a scale of 1 to 9 is silly without being quite silly enough to be funny on it's own.
Given a couple of hours, one could put together something really quite detailed and almost believable. Toss in amusing anecdotes about data collection and recommendations for government or military organizations, and it could be great fun. Start off with a few pages of just barely plausible stuff, and then dive into total absurdity at the end. Hell, one could even toss in *actual* data collected in some obviously crazy way and make an AIR-worthy article out of it.
If we're going to bemoan the decline of the geek slashdot reader, we had better include a lament for the geek prank story writer.
I once accidentally left a $300 radio in a car with the driver's side window fully open sitting in Hyde Park (Chicago) while out of town for two weeks. Came back to find the front seat covered with tree leaves that had blown in, and the stereo right where I'd left it.
There are benefits to driving a car so old and filthy that no one even bothers to look at the dash. }8^)
>This system will be useful when one has a paper
>in hand, but does not have the bibtex entry.
Perhaps I'm spoiled by working in a field with very good online databases and journals that require only brief bibliographic entries, but it's hard to imagine where this would actually be useful. 95% of the papers one has in hand were located via an online database and came with bibtex entries. On the rare occasion one finds a paper copy of an article and no bibtex entry, it's usually faster to generate one by hand than to find it in a database.
If there are people who find it useful, I'm happy for them. But, I don't see it myself.
It also seems like it could worsen the propagation of errors in citations. An interesting, if tangential, discussion of the topic is in a paper by Simkin and Roychowdhury. (Note that I'm not endorsing the authors' claim that propagating errors in citations indicate that papers have not been read. A more plausible argument is that authors tend to assemble their citations *after* having completed the paper and crib citation text in order to save time formatting their own. Then again, I suppose that suggests that there are a lot of people who actually will use a service like this one.)
. . . one had to take it using an insecure browser? There's some humor there, somewhere.
Without headers, working links (to harmless, locally hosted copies of the original pages), or context, I'd be surprised if anyone gets a perfect score.
Newsflash! 30% of gold watch buyers cannot distinguish between a real and a fake timepiece, when shown a black and white photocopy of a photograph of an advertizement. Watchmakers band together to demand something be done to protect our economy from this growing threat.
And, while we're at it - setting up a loaded quiz in order to frighten people and then requiring their names and email addresses in order to offer security advice may not be fraud, but it sure isn't a friendly way to do business.
>why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie >friendly installations out of the box?
At the risk of being sucked into a religious war, I'll assume this is a serious question.
The first response must be, what do you mean by a newbie?
If you mean someone who have never touched anything but windows and has no experience with a unix shell or a text editor, and who doesn't have any close linux-head friends to turn to for help and advice, then I agree with you. Slackware may not be the best way to take a first step into linux.
If you mean someone who doesn't *want* to ever have to edit a text file because they have some philosophical objection to it, then slackware is not the distribution for them. I realize there are actually a lot of these people in the world, and that there's probably no point in trying to change their minds. I'm all in favor of creating distributions for them to use, but Slack really isn't one of them.
On the other hand, if you mean someone who's got a couple of basic shell commands under their belt and has spent a dozen hours in some kind of *nix and is looking to put together a useful system, then I'd argue slackware is actually a great way to start out administering linux.
First of all, the skills one acquires living in slackware for a while are easily transported to just about any other *nix out there. If you start out relying entirely on distribution specific config tools, you end up having to start over from scratch every time you switch to something else.
Second, the problem with nifty auto-configurators is that they have a habbit of failing. In slack, if your something doesn't work, it's easy to find out what's actually broken and how to fix it, 'cause in the process of setting it up you've already met all the relevant files. On more "friendly" systems, you merely get a cryptic error message that the fancy wizard failed; or more often than not, a message that everything is set up and working fine even though it's not.
As someone who followed the path windows+sun->debian->mandrake->slackware+openbs d (and a bunch of quickly discarded experiments with other distros along the way), I'm sorry I didn't start out with slack sooner. I'm fond of both debian and mandrake, but I wasted a whole lot of time struggling to solve problems that were distro specific rather than actually using the system. Slack may take a little while longer to set up if everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong it's a hell of a lot easier to solve.
I've got a pair of grado 80's, and I can't imagine that ambient sound would be a problem at any sane level. I've been using them in the lab for a while with no complaints from co-workers.
If I set a normal listening level and place them on my thigh in a moderately quiet office environment (a very large room with a couple computers and other gizmos humming), I can't tell whether or not they're turned on.
Sure, open air headphones could be a problem if you're in a recording studio, or *possibly* sitting directly next to someone trying to concentrate in a totally silent room deep in the woods. But for an office, it's not an issue; at least that's true with their usual headphones. I've never tried their monitor series. Could be that the bigger ones are louder.
Incidentally, their headphones are great. Lovely sound, for a fraction of the cost of the competition.
Perhaps the option which is more labor intensive (but not for you) is to tell the prof's to assign a few pages to each student in the course and ask that the students typeset their section. If there are difficulties about assigning that sort of thing, you can always make it optional and have students volunteer. Most probably will. Make sure everyone is using the same format - eg. latex with standard packages - and then just combine everything.
Sure, it's a lot of work. But at the end you'll have a beautiful set of notes, and they'll be easy to edit the next time the class is taught. It will also save you the trouble of either trying to get image->text converts to handle equations or the file size hit that comes with encoding everything as images.
I've seen this work beautifully in a single grad level technical course. Might be a lot more difficult in a general-ed class, where students have less invested in the material and may not even understand the text they're typesetting.
A very cheap, funky, but workable alternative is to use a fax machine and a faxmodem. Chances are there's a machine somewhere in the department which will take a stack of hundreds of pages. Just send them all to a computer and convert them to the compressed format of your choice. Our campus has a centralized system that does this. The result is an ugly, low-resulution mess, but it does work. The quality won't be anything close to what a professional typesetter would produce, but it has the advantage of being both free and ongoing.
- Munpfazy (rather thinks it ought to be the prof's job to typeset their own damn notes... but can see why that might not be easy to argue.)
It only becomes a security issue if it decides to install things without prompting or without telling the user where a driver is coming from. As long as it's possible to see what the system is doing and potentially override a bad decision, it's no more dangerous than installing drivers the old fashioned way.
Giving the user a chance to say "no" is vital. There are a lot of people who would be willing to run a signed binary driver from someone like nvidia, but would *not* be willing to install a binary driver compiled and submitted by some random dude somewhere. (And no, I'm not a proponent of closed source drivers. The key word here is *binary*. Given a choice, I'd much rather install an open source driver written by some dude somewhere.) Just don't expect us to trust you that a particular driver is safe.
Offering the option of an "install everything without asking questions" mode is okay, but at least force them to actively acknowledge that they're putting the security of their system in your hands. Many will probably choose it, and that's great. But the linux newbie who plugs in a second network card for the first time ought to be given fair warning.
That said, I'm probably not going to use a system like this any time soon. So far every attempt at hardware auto-configuration I've tried has turned out to be a bigger pain in the neck than just installing things by hand. It also seems like making it work would be really tough. What version of the kernel/kernl-options/kernel-patches/x11/alsa/etc is a person running? Trying to support all possible options isn't easy.
On the other hand, if you've found a way to make it work, more power to you! I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful.
At least for those of us who dislike *both* gnome and kde. ('Cause they're klunky, slow, and annoying, each in its own individual way.)
If it weren't for the entrenched battle between gnome and kde, I suspect many developers for both would have long ago made it impossible to run their software without also running their favorite desktop. As it is, we have to put up with a bunch of directories full of nearly unused material and a constant stream of silly error messages, but at least it's *possible* to run all those cute "k-" and "g-" programs.
There's a vital difference between counting people and identifying individual people.
As long as the sensors are clearly marked, and they don't capture video or return information that could identify someone without their permission, then there doesn't seem to be any privacy concern. After all, someone who really doesn't want to be found can walk *around* the sensors.
It's only when you capture video or sound or try to pin serial numbers on individual people that it becomes an issue.
I say, make them using wait high enclosures, paint them yellow, and add an emergency button with an intercom. Not only will you avoid having to battle the tin foil hat crowd, but they'll become even more useful since people can turn to them in an emergency.
If, on the other hand, you were planning to hide video cameras twenty feet up in pine trees, that *would* raise privacy concerns.
One option that comes to mind, assuming you're willing to tinker and have more time than money:
Find an old (eg, first generation pentium-I) computer, and set it up in the closet running a trim linux or BSD distro. For something between free and $20 US, plus the cost of a hard-drive and two network cards (and or a hub), you can put together a nearly secure storage system. You could also turn it into a cheap firewall while you're at it, which could be a very good thing once security updates for win98 stop happening, if they haven't already.
For example, set up a samba server on the old computer with individual users for everyone in the house. Then just keep all your personal files there. If you want it to be more secure (eg - somewhat protected from people who might use a rescue disk to boot into your server box), then set up an encrypted filesystem for each user using loop-aes for linux or bsd's built in vnd encryption. SSH into the second machine and unencrypt your directory every time you want to use it. There's probably some way to set up the ssh client on windows to log in automatically and run a script, so that you can be one click away from the encryption password.
If you're really paranoid, note this doesn't protect you from someone desperate to get at your stuff - they could still pull out your hard drive and add a keystroke logger or file copier, but it would protect you from a casual browser. Basically, if you think they'd be willing to use screwdrivers, then you need a better solution, like a usb drive. You could also encrypt the whole drive on the server box, which would allow at least one person to know it is secure, but since they could just as easily add malicious stuff to the windows box to spy on you, it probably isn't worth it.
This is all assuming that it's possible to make windows forget samba passwords without rebooting. It's been years since I've used windows, and I've never messed with samba, so I'm just guessing that it is.
Of course an easier solution may be a usb flash drive, or an external hard drive, which you can lock in a drawer when you're away.
> Packaging policy has more effect on the user > experience than any of the topics normally mentioned > in a review.
I agree with you. But, how does one decide what a *good* package manager is?
Is it a package manager that keep track of dependencies and offers a tricked out system complete with every imaginable piece of software? (Debian) Or is it one that explicitly refuses to keep track of dependencies and provides a trim, functional system onto which users can install from source? (Slackware) Or is it some Frankenstein nightmare that stumbles along between the two but has more widely available third party binaries? (rpm-land)
The differences are certainly real, but whether a particular system is good or bad will depend on both the intended audience and the philosophy of the reviewer.
That's not to say a very thorough article, or series of articles written by fans of the different available systems, wouldn't be a useful addition to the literature. I'd love to see such a thing. (Yeah, yeah - "then why don't you write it." Can't argue with that.)
But, once it is written, that's pretty much it until someone comes up with a really new idea. It doesn't do much to improve the review of the brand new ManHatSuDrosian-10.34-pro-edition.
Slashdot Mirror
>Clearly, businesses are not in the business of providing >jobs.. they are in the business of transacting business.. >With the lowest costs possible.. which means the highest >efficiency.. That's not at all clear. Or rather, it's clear that they're not *currently* in the business of providing jobs, but it's far from clear that they shouldn't be. Corporations are chartered by the government for the public good - it's up to us to decide what that means. (And maximizing profit for investors by any means sure isn't what I'd call public good.) Even private companies depend on their community for the infrastructure that allows them to exist. It doesn't seem unreasonable to require that they also operate in a way that benefits that community. Ellipses rarely make for a sound argument.
I'm a huge open source fan, and it really riles me to have to use proprietary software, but it's hard to match what IDL can do. With a little practice you can go from raw data to publication quality plots in a staggeringly short period of time.
So far I've yet to find anything close in the open source world. PerlDL + pgplot is the best contender. The authors seem to be very careful to do things properly and a lot of the functions one needs are already available. But the documentation is a great steaming pile of beetle dung and it's almost impossible for a new person to get started, and they don't (yet?) seem to have some of nifty multi-dimensional array processing features that IDL offers.
If anyone knows of a good alternative, I'd love to hear about it! I'll be watching this thread in the hope that there's a project out there somewhere that's slipped through the cracks.
I agree - the use of the new device at the end was quite well done, and fit in well with the Adams material.
But - why the hell did they have to go and ruin it with the silly dialog and the "I'm a woman" joke after they recover the device? Tossing in a totally artificial punchline joke ruined the whole scene. My row in the theater (of Adams' loving geeks) groaned and looked around at each other in disbelief at that line, and the theater (which was full of laughs and cheers most of the time) was dead silent. Placing punch line jokes into a film hasn't worked since the Marx Brothers. (And no, there wasn't any sort of deep cynical meta-humor attached to the joke. It was delivered straight, and treated as sincere dialog. It was just awful.)
The film had some entertaining moments - and not all of them were true to Adams' work. The Malkovich sermon was quite well orchestrated. Marvin was played with perfection. The scenes of workmen building Earth were beautifully carried off. What Ford and Arthur turn into when they get picked up by the Heart of Gold is new, but it worked fine and captured essence of the book passage in a much shorter amount of time than would have been required for the original scene.
And some of the characters were faithful. Slartibartfast came off beautifully, even if one of his greatest lines was burried in a distracting fast paced edit. Trillian was believable. Marvin was great.
On the whole, though, I have to agree with MJ Simpson. The movie failed miserably to capture any of the magic in previous renditions of the guide, and for reasons that were entirely preventable. The humor was exaggerated and dumb gags (the lemon squeezer, the fly swatters) replaced truly funny dialog. Zaphod captured none of the qualities of the Adams' character. He was a clown, and not even an entertaining clown. The romance addition could have been okay, but they made things far too obvious to be interesting and wasted minutes of dialog explaining the obvious.
LocalWords: Malkovich Slartibartfast burried Trillian
That assumes the users are familiar with the DOS command prompt.
First of all, that doesn't describe the usual windows user, even among seemingly tech savy people. (Which, if you'll forgive a brief flame, is no surprise given the crippled and disgusting nature of the DOS shell... why would anyone use it for anything if they had a choice?)
Second, anyone who intuitively reaches for DOS commands will pick up a dozen unix commands in minutes. And, once they know the actual command, they'll instantly have access to man files and online help sources, and they'll be able to easily switch to a different unix machine without confusion. Just try a google search to find out to make the unix command "dir" sort by date. If you ask me, aliasing commands to totally different names is asking for trouble. At best, it will never be noticed by anyone. At worst, one will have a bunch of pissed off users a few weeks down the line.
Someone else in this thread suggested aliasing the dos commands to display help messages instead. That sounds like a very good idea!
. . . is something like:
echo 'Running the file ~/.bashrc. More information is available using the command "man bash"'
With similar notices in all the dot files.
As I recall one of the fist headaches I encountered when meeting unix was just trying to figure out which files were run when. We has both bash and csh stuff in the skeleton files, as well a all the other not-obviously irrelevant dot files that get generated over time. For a newbie, it's not at all obvious which files to fiddle with in order to make something happen.
A few other minor suggestions -
Document the dot files with excessive comments. It will help newbies get up to speed faster when they try to change something.
Adding a "-i" to aliases for all the dangerous commands is a good idea, if you ask me.
Adding a couple examples of aliases, $PATH modification, maybe an if statement, launching an xterm with some geometry and colors, and so on might be nice so people have something to get started on as they try to change their shell to their liking.
>In the meantime, You can still confirm someone's identity uniquely by the
>transmissions of their passport -- Who they are needs to be determined
>separately, but you don't need to decode an RFID to use it for tracking.
> -- it's just a case of having a transmitter/reciever that's powerful
> enough to get thru the passport's tinfoile hat.
A very good point.
How long do you think it will be before some police agency somewhere decides to scan the crowd at a street protest in order to make a table of known "trouble-makers?" Whether or not they can retrieve your name doesn't matter - they can get that from you later on.
Giving people a unique, broadcast ID may thwart some of the more obvious opportunities for identity theft, but it does nothing to address privacy concerns.
I'm not kidding. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a useful skill. Take the $50 you'd spend to get your unit repaired and spend the money on a used soldering iron and a shiny new tip instead.
s /Soldered.pdf
Then (here's the important part) practice on stuff that you won't miss before you try repairing the drive. Raid your neighbor's garbage for old electronics and spend a few hours removing components, replacing them, tinning wires, etc.
Two nice online introductions to soldering (both originally produced by Nasa) are located here:
http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/elab/soldering.htm
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/bsc/PDFFile
Or, if you really don't want to learn to solder, talk to your neighbors. See if there's a ham radio club in your neighborhood. Hunt for a radio/television repair shop. Drop by the electronics shop at your local community college. Or, chat up the guy selling refurbished electronics at the nearest swap-meet.
A determined employee will always be able to find a way to sneak information out of your door, and the more you irritate and harass your employees by treating them like children, the more likely it is they'll want to do so!
Let's say you manage to permanently disable all usb storage device drivers in the building, and every machine is in a padlocked cage and set up to trigger alarms if anyone tries to mess with the hardware, and you've got every network connection rigged to alarms so that no one can remove a cable and insert a recording device.
A determined thief will still find a way around it. Maybe they'll sneak in a digital camera and film a bunch of screen shots. (How long would it take to display all the code you care about at ten screens-full per second? Not long enough, I suspect.) Or maybe they'll create a hardware malfunction and use that as cover to get their hands on a hard drive or to insert a logger somewhere. Or maybe they'll take the most interesting bits, compress it, turn it into ascii, and print it in place of pages 51-74 of a new equipment manual before sneaking it out in their pockets. Or perhaps they'll just show up around midnight with bolt cutters and do it the low tech way.
Or, if your IP is really novel and interesting, they'll simply remember important parts and sell them to someone else willing to flush out the details in their own way.
Unless you've got brilliant and scrupulously honest security people and you're willing to make the lives of your employees miserable by passing them through metal detectors on the way in and out of the building, and every scrap of media in the office is locked up at all times before being securely destroyed, and none of your employees are ever permitted to send any material anywhere in any format, you're out of luck.
That isn't to say you shouldn't discourage people from removing material. Sternly telling them not to take a bit of work home with them on the weekend is one thing. But once you've made it clear that they're forbidden to do so, trying to outwit the determined thief is bound not only to fail, but also to irritate your trustworthy employees.
From the article:
>IT IS one of the most famous, and most
>embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998,
>astronomers discovered that the universe is
>expanding at ever faster speeds.
Embarrassing? Since when is being able to study something qualitatively new and unexpected an embarrassment? One would expect cosmologists to jump for joy at their luck. (And among those whom I know, everyone does!)
If anything, dark energy is a triumph of experimental science. An experimental groups found something no one expected, and within a hand full of years, armed only with careful data analysis, they convinced not only themselves but everyone else that it was genuine and radically changed our picture of the universe. Since then we've accumulated even more convinging data, and found independant evidence to confirm the existance of dark energy. There is a vigerous community studying the problem and proposing new tests, and theorists everywhere proposing new and interesting ways to accomodate the data. One couldn't hope for a more perfect example of science working in the way we all like to believe it does.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, is a *real* embarrassment for physics - dozens of seemingly reputable scientists have spent millions of dollars and decades of work and produced diddly squat. The experimental case isn't bulletproof - it's just so riddled with holes that no one notices when new bullets pass through it. The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
One need only look at the popularity of web-mail applications to realize that there are a lot of people in the world who would probably jump on a system such as the one described.
But, that's *only* because their expectations have been driven into the ground by unbelievably slow and buggy local software.
The article says it all:
>Now, think about Gmail, which,
>in a broadband situation
>(I'll deal with that in a couple of
>paragraphs), is probably more responsive
>than Outlook.
It's true - gmail *is* faster than outlook, but that's only because outlook is shockingly slow. Neither one can compete against an efficient mail reader. For example, after a few minutes of practice, any mutt user can sort many tens of messages in the time it takes to retrieve a single page from gmail, even on a a pentium-I with a high speed university pipe.
Likewise, I claim the popularity of the buggy, featureless text editors built into browsers is a direct consequence of the buggy, featureless, and unendurably slow local word processors. Why don't browsers default to using external editors for filling in text fields? Because most people would end up using a terrible (if esthetically beautiful) editor anyway, and therefore don't see the difference.
That said, remote applications can work. They've been working for decades. I'm currently submitting this message from a computer at home on a modest DSL line, into which I am remotely logged in through two separate ssh tunnels. (Two, because of dumb firewall rules that I cannot control.) The latency is occasionally noticeable, but it's orders of magnitude faster than gmail.
There's no question that remote applications can run reasonably fast - so long as they only exchange text (or text like cues) and the display is stored locally, and so long as they don't require huge amounts of processing on the display side. But to do anything efficient in a browser will require a philosophical (rather than technological) revolution among browser designers and those who build web based applications. Hell, browsers themselves are among the slowest programs around. And as anyone who's tried to run a recent graphical browser on an old machine knows, moving applications to the browser certainly isn't going to save anyone CPU time.
. . . a reason not to use software?
Surely the decision to make one-time use of free software for performing a quantitative task in a non-professional environment ought to be made based on something other than whether it comes with super-nifty 3D shadowed buttons in your favorite candy-apple color.
I say, give those windows95ish program a try, and don't ask for alternatives until you've found them lacking in function rather than style.
Besides, just think of all the fun you can have with those extra cpu cycles that won't be wasted drawing pretty pictures around the border of your software.
I hope the mod-gods will allow a brief tangential rant.
My prediction: all the people who rip or purchase audio in lossy formats today will hate their decision in a few years. (The only exception is, of course, ripping audio destined solely for a portable player - which is a very different scenario from trying to archive audio in compressed formats.)
Sure - an mp3 file sounds pretty good, most of the time. It's stunning that it sounds as good as it does. But, it doesn't sound perfect.
Reasonable people may object that even with perfect hearing and a great pair of headphones, one would only notice a difference between a "lame --preset extreme" file and the original in one album out of a thousand. That's probably true. The same sure isn't true about a 128 cbr file, of the sort one can buy online from a dozen vendors for the same price as a CD - it isn't hard to find a track full of noticeable artifacts when made with the best encoder around. People who encode things are even lower rates ("because it's mostly speech anyway") really shouldn't have to wait around in order to hate themselves - there's plenty of reason to feel bad right now.
So, why not assume it's good enough and not worry? Here's the catch: the cost of archiving audio in a lossless format is very small today, and will become vanishingly small over the next few years. For something like 15 cents an album at the price of a hard drive (much less if you're archiving to dvd and you buy disks on sale), you can guarantee for all time that your audio will always be good enough. It will sound great on the headphone you're going to buy in five years, to the audiophile spouse you haven't yet met, and even when chopped up added to an audio mix when some radio station geek digs it out of an estate sale seventy five years from now.
In ten years, when the additional cost of storing your entire audio library in lossless format drops to the price of a meal, you'll hate yourself for not having done so. (Of course those of you silly enough to buy tracks with drm limits on the number of machines on which it can be played are going to hate yourselves much more, and probably somewhat sooner.)
Just think how annoying it is when you hear a recording of some great, lost radio program that was made on a consumer tape deck set to "long play." If you're anything like me, you curse the short sighted people who bargained away the future for the cost of a dollar cassette.
And don't assume that you can just run out and pick up a new copy of the album. Even within the mainstream music industry, there are countless lost albums whose masters have been destroyed, and many more which lie abandoned with no promise of a reprinting. There's no reason to believe things will be any different in the future.
Anyway - to be slightly more on topic - I agree, FLAC is great. Don't know of any exiting conversion utilities, however it would take more than a few dozen lines of perl to throw something together. There are command line tools to rip a cd, run a database lookup, and encode to most formats.
If you want to make it slighly less annoying, hit a pc junker store and pick up as many cheap old cdrom drives as you have IDE slots. That'll make the disk changing somewhat less annoying. (If you want to go nuts, pick up five 486 pc's, and fill them all with cd drives... that is, assuming spending a weekend setting up an automated super-ripper sounds like more fun than spending a weekend babysitting your cdrom drive.)
>Apparantly not and many others like him don't /. home of the nerd/geek who
>get it either. Read the comments below and weep
>for what once was
>understood math jokes.
To be fair, though, we ought to recognize that as math jokes go, it's particularly badly constructed and not very funny. Understanding the joke in this case amounts to something rather like, "Oh - a nonsense formula which isn't even flushed out enough to be engaging. Guess it was meant to be a joke. Pity they didn't do more with it."
If one is going to go to the trouble of sending up a story in the papers, it's worth spending at least a few moments putting together something coherent. They could at least tell us what the formula is supposed to do (as written, it ain't a probability) and choose sane parameters. "Frequency" measured on a scale of 1 to 9 is silly without being quite silly enough to be funny on it's own.
Given a couple of hours, one could put together something really quite detailed and almost believable. Toss in amusing anecdotes about data collection and recommendations for government or military organizations, and it could be great fun. Start off with a few pages of just barely plausible stuff, and then dive into total absurdity at the end. Hell, one could even toss in *actual* data collected in some obviously crazy way and make an AIR-worthy article out of it.
If we're going to bemoan the decline of the geek slashdot reader, we had better include a lament for the geek prank story writer.
I once accidentally left a $300 radio in a car with the driver's side window fully open sitting in Hyde Park (Chicago) while out of town for two weeks. Came back to find the front seat covered with tree leaves that had blown in, and the stereo right where I'd left it.
There are benefits to driving a car so old and filthy that no one even bothers to look at the dash. }8^)
Can't imagine anyone else will care except me, but this tickled me.
Five minutes ago I just referenced the same paper in response to a different slashdot article.
Nothing like discussing something you haven't thought of for a year only to stumble across it again minutes later.
Coincidence is fun.
. . . will this actually be useful?
>This system will be useful when one has a paper
>in hand, but does not have the bibtex entry.
Perhaps I'm spoiled by working in a field with very good online databases and journals that require only brief bibliographic entries, but it's hard to imagine where this would actually be useful. 95% of the papers one has in hand were located via an online database and came with bibtex entries. On the rare occasion one finds a paper copy of an article and no bibtex entry, it's usually faster to generate one by hand than to find it in a database.
If there are people who find it useful, I'm happy for them. But, I don't see it myself.
It also seems like it could worsen the propagation of errors in citations. An interesting, if tangential, discussion of the topic is in a paper by Simkin and Roychowdhury. (Note that I'm not endorsing the authors' claim that propagating errors in citations indicate that papers have not been read. A more plausible argument is that authors tend to assemble their citations *after* having completed the paper and crib citation text in order to save time formatting their own. Then again, I suppose that suggests that there are a lot of people who actually will use a service like this one.)
. . . one had to take it using an insecure browser? There's some humor there, somewhere.
Without headers, working links (to harmless, locally hosted copies of the original pages), or context, I'd be surprised if anyone gets a perfect score.
Newsflash! 30% of gold watch buyers cannot distinguish between a real and a fake timepiece, when shown a black and white photocopy of a photograph of an advertizement. Watchmakers band together to demand something be done to protect our economy from this growing threat.
And, while we're at it - setting up a loaded quiz in order to frighten people and then requiring their names and email addresses in order to offer security advice may not be fraud, but it sure isn't a friendly way to do business.
>why would a newbie do this when you can find newbie
>friendly installations out of the box?
At the risk of being sucked into a religious war, I'll assume this is a serious question.
The first response must be, what do you mean by a newbie?
If you mean someone who have never touched anything but windows and has no experience with a unix shell or a text editor, and who doesn't have any close linux-head friends to turn to for help and advice, then I agree with you. Slackware may not be the best way to take a first step into linux.
If you mean someone who doesn't *want* to ever have to edit a text file because they have some philosophical objection to it, then slackware is not the distribution for them. I realize there are actually a lot of these people in the world, and that there's probably no point in trying to change their minds. I'm all in favor of creating distributions for them to use, but Slack really isn't one of them.
On the other hand, if you mean someone who's got a couple of basic shell commands under their belt and has spent a dozen hours in some kind of *nix and is looking to put together a useful system, then I'd argue slackware is actually a great way to start out administering linux.
First of all, the skills one acquires living in slackware for a while are easily transported to just about any other *nix out there. If you start out relying entirely on distribution specific config tools, you end up having to start over from scratch every time you switch to something else.
Second, the problem with nifty auto-configurators is that they have a habbit of failing. In slack, if your something doesn't work, it's easy to find out what's actually broken and how to fix it, 'cause in the process of setting it up you've already met all the relevant files. On more "friendly" systems, you merely get a cryptic error message that the fancy wizard failed; or more often than not, a message that everything is set up and working fine even though it's not.
As someone who followed the path windows+sun->debian->mandrake->slackware+openbs d (and a bunch of quickly discarded experiments with other distros along the way), I'm sorry I didn't start out with slack sooner. I'm fond of both debian and mandrake, but I wasted a whole lot of time struggling to solve problems that were distro specific rather than actually using the system. Slack may take a little while longer to set up if everything goes right, but if anything goes wrong it's a hell of a lot easier to solve.
I've got a pair of grado 80's, and I can't imagine that ambient sound would be a problem at any sane level. I've been using them in the lab for a while with no complaints from co-workers.
If I set a normal listening level and place them on my thigh in a moderately quiet office environment (a very large room with a couple computers and other gizmos humming), I can't tell whether or not they're turned on.
Sure, open air headphones could be a problem if you're in a recording studio, or *possibly* sitting directly next to someone trying to concentrate in a totally silent room deep in the woods. But for an office, it's not an issue; at least that's true with their usual headphones. I've never tried their monitor series. Could be that the bigger ones are louder.
Incidentally, their headphones are great. Lovely sound, for a fraction of the cost of the competition.
Perhaps the option which is more labor intensive (but not for you) is to tell the prof's to assign a few pages to each student in the course and ask that the students typeset their section. If there are difficulties about assigning that sort of thing, you can always make it optional and have students volunteer. Most probably will. Make sure everyone is using the same format - eg. latex with standard packages - and then just combine everything.
Sure, it's a lot of work. But at the end you'll have a beautiful set of notes, and they'll be easy to edit the next time the class is taught. It will also save you the trouble of either trying to get image->text converts to handle equations or the file size hit that comes with encoding everything as images.
I've seen this work beautifully in a single grad level technical course. Might be a lot more difficult in a general-ed class, where students have less invested in the material and may not even understand the text they're typesetting.
A very cheap, funky, but workable alternative is to use a fax machine and a faxmodem. Chances are there's a machine somewhere in the department which will take a stack of hundreds of pages. Just send them all to a computer and convert them to the compressed format of your choice. Our campus has a centralized system that does this. The result is an ugly, low-resulution mess, but it does work. The quality won't be anything close to what a professional typesetter would produce, but it has the advantage of being both free and ongoing.
- Munpfazy (rather thinks it ought to be the prof's job to typeset their own damn notes... but can see why that might not be easy to argue.)
It only becomes a security issue if it decides to install things without prompting or without telling the user where a driver is coming from. As long as it's possible to see what the system is doing and potentially override a bad decision, it's no more dangerous than installing drivers the old fashioned way.
Giving the user a chance to say "no" is vital. There are a lot of people who would be willing to run a signed binary driver from someone like nvidia, but would *not* be willing to install a binary driver compiled and submitted by some random dude somewhere. (And no, I'm not a proponent of closed source drivers. The key word here is *binary*. Given a choice, I'd much rather install an open source driver written by some dude somewhere.) Just don't expect us to trust you that a particular driver is safe.
Offering the option of an "install everything without asking questions" mode is okay, but at least force them to actively acknowledge that they're putting the security of their system in your hands. Many will probably choose it, and that's great. But the linux newbie who plugs in a second network card for the first time ought to be given fair warning.
That said, I'm probably not going to use a system like this any time soon. So far every attempt at hardware auto-configuration I've tried has turned out to be a bigger pain in the neck than just installing things by hand. It also seems like making it work would be really tough. What version of the kernel/kernl-options/kernel-patches/x11/alsa/etc is a person running? Trying to support all possible options isn't easy.
On the other hand, if you've found a way to make it work, more power to you! I'm sure a lot of people will find it useful.
At least for those of us who dislike *both* gnome and kde. ('Cause they're klunky, slow, and annoying, each in its own individual way.)
If it weren't for the entrenched battle between gnome and kde, I suspect many developers for both would have long ago made it impossible to run their software without also running their favorite desktop. As it is, we have to put up with a bunch of directories full of nearly unused material and a constant stream of silly error messages, but at least it's *possible* to run all those cute "k-" and "g-" programs.
I agree.
There's a vital difference between counting people and identifying individual people.
As long as the sensors are clearly marked, and they don't capture video or return information that could identify someone without their permission, then there doesn't seem to be any privacy concern. After all, someone who really doesn't want to be found can walk *around* the sensors.
It's only when you capture video or sound or try to pin serial numbers on individual people that it becomes an issue.
I say, make them using wait high enclosures, paint them yellow, and add an emergency button with an intercom. Not only will you avoid having to battle the tin foil hat crowd, but they'll become even more useful since people can turn to them in an emergency.
If, on the other hand, you were planning to hide video cameras twenty feet up in pine trees, that *would* raise privacy concerns.
One option that comes to mind, assuming you're willing to tinker and have more time than money:
Find an old (eg, first generation pentium-I) computer, and set it up in the closet running a trim linux or BSD distro. For something between free and $20 US, plus the cost of a hard-drive and two network cards (and or a hub), you can put together a nearly secure storage system. You could also turn it into a cheap firewall while you're at it, which could be a very good thing once security updates for win98 stop happening, if they haven't already.
For example, set up a samba server on the old computer with individual users for everyone in the house. Then just keep all your personal files there. If you want it to be more secure (eg - somewhat protected from people who might use a rescue disk to boot into your server box), then set up an encrypted filesystem for each user using loop-aes for linux or bsd's built in vnd encryption. SSH into the second machine and unencrypt your directory every time you want to use it. There's probably some way to set up the ssh client on windows to log in automatically and run a script, so that you can be one click away from the encryption password.
If you're really paranoid, note this doesn't protect you from someone desperate to get at your stuff - they could still pull out your hard drive and add a keystroke logger or file copier, but it would protect you from a casual browser. Basically, if you think they'd be willing to use screwdrivers, then you need a better solution, like a usb drive. You could also encrypt the whole drive on the server box, which would allow at least one person to know it is secure, but since they could just as easily add malicious stuff to the windows box to spy on you, it probably isn't worth it.
This is all assuming that it's possible to make windows forget samba passwords without rebooting. It's been years since I've used windows, and I've never messed with samba, so I'm just guessing that it is.
Of course an easier solution may be a usb flash drive, or an external hard drive, which you can lock in a drawer when you're away.
> Packaging policy has more effect on the user
> experience than any of the topics normally mentioned
> in a review.
I agree with you. But, how does one decide what a *good* package manager is?
Is it a package manager that keep track of dependencies and offers a tricked out system complete with every imaginable piece of software? (Debian) Or is it one that explicitly refuses to keep track of dependencies and provides a trim, functional system onto which users can install from source? (Slackware) Or is it some Frankenstein nightmare that stumbles along between the two but has more widely available third party binaries? (rpm-land)
The differences are certainly real, but whether a particular system is good or bad will depend on both the intended audience and the philosophy of the reviewer.
That's not to say a very thorough article, or series of articles written by fans of the different available systems, wouldn't be a useful addition to the literature. I'd love to see such a thing. (Yeah, yeah - "then why don't you write it." Can't argue with that.)
But, once it is written, that's pretty much it until someone comes up with a really new idea. It doesn't do much to improve the review of the brand new ManHatSuDrosian-10.34-pro-edition.
- Munpfazy (ducks back into his Slackware cave.)