7) Russian Mafia all actually use Macs, tell underlings to keep macs virus free so they don't have to run virus scanners.
This ain't no fun. I was trying to find sites dealing with programming Mac OS X, and "hacking mac community" search on Google turned up this: http://freaky.staticusers.net/update.shtml. The site has a lots of downloadable software used for sending spam, initiating DoS attacks etc. Looks like shady figures of Internet too appreciate the stability of the Mac platform...
Wow. It used to be other way around. I'm calling the Greenpeace to ask Google to donate the technology for turning books into trees to them. Then all we have to do is send all junk literature to Amazonas, and presto -- rain forests saved!
I'm eagerly awaiting worldpeace.google.com shortly after this one.
Same here. I was buying lot more CDs when they weren't crippled. The thought of the CD being crippled automatically makes me not want to buy it. This all gradually led to me completely losing the interest in even browsing the CD stands at malls -- whenever I got to one, I bought 3 CDs on average, but I haven't done it for at least a year now, as I was frustrated by the proliferation of crippled CDs. I have a +150 collection of CDs dating from times when the whole thing wasn't screwed up royally. Interpolating the tendency shows that they did lose quite many sales to me. Such is life. I guess they'll just write me off as "not buying anymore because he pirates" in their statistics, but in reality I don't have a single MP3 anywhere, either legal or illegal. I exclusively listen to the radio and my old CDs in sort of a spontaneous passive resistance against CD crippling for some time now.
I own a copy of Diablo II, and the contents of the CD are dual PC/Mac. I know someone who recently switched to Mac, and all the Blizzard titles he owns (he also owns Diablo II, as well as Warcraft) work nicely on Mac. He told me Blizzard releases all their titles on CDs that are playable on both a PC and a Mac. Therefore I don't think there's much assembly code in there.
Just out of curiosity, I scooped the OS X games on Amazon, and there's lot of them (you can say that I'm a wannabe Mac switcher myself). I was relieved to know that I won't have to miss nor Sim City 4 nor Civilization III if I switch (although unlike Blizzard titles, I'll have to separately purchase the Mac version). Doom III is also available. So, it's not so bleak when it comes to games.
Other than that, I'm seriously entertaining the idea of giving up gaming on my PC altogether. There's just too many things I depend on for living on my primary machine to keep lots of unrelated gunk installed on it. I'm seriously considering buying an Xbox for my Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory needs (played the demo on PC and got rather interested). As well as for Halo 2, of course.
I don't know, there seems to be a segment of the population (and apparently at least one is a/. editor) for whom the mere mention of an iPod makes something newsworthy. Because whoa, it's an iPod! Any example of someone using it, in no matter how trivial and normal a way, is automatically soo cool.
Not true. I recently submitted a story about Doom running on iPod and they rejected it.
In an anonymous system, the key is the identity. The man-in-the-middle can discredit his own private key, but he still can't discredit the original author's private key. People will attribute credibility to a key, based on the history of what was earlier published signed with that key. In such a setup, merely acting as a copycat of another person for a while and then diverting from it won't hurt the credibility of the original person.
Amen. My latest (and last - switching to Apple) x86 PC laptop has all kinds of issues - doesn't wake up from standby twice in every three occasions (must be rebooted), hangs with USB2.0 enabled (must be rebooted) etc. The hardware manufacturer blames Microsoft, Microsoft blames the hardware manufacturer. The PC world of separated hardware and OS vendors is flawed from the user's point of view, as the hardware is worthless without an OS, and the OS is worthless without the hardware. I'm looking forward to entering the Apple world, where if something doesn't work, I only have a single party to take the responsibility, instead of two that pass the buck one to another.
What worries me is the end of a certain status quo. Before yesterday, PowerBook G4 was to be the top line of Apple laptops for a longer foreseeable future, knowing that engineering difficulties pretty much made a G5 PowerBook impossible. So, software engineers at Apple and elsewhere would be forced by this fact (at least that's what I was hoping for until yesterday) to carefully develop their software so that it runs efficiently on a G4, because that's what's ticking in Apple's top-o'-the-line laptop. If Leopard or the next version of iLife or whatever else software turns out to run like a lame dog on a G4 PowerBook, that'd be bad for them, because they couldn't tell you to upgrade, because there's nothing to upgrade to. Hence, they'd probably bend backwards to make sure the software runs fast on it in the first place.
Now however, one year down the line, they can just tell me that it runs fine on the Pentium-M PowerBook and that I really should upgrade my old outdated G4 piece of junk. So, what I'm afraid of is that future software releases will be tuned to run fast on x86 first (and maybe G5 second, but I'm not really holding my breath for that), but there'll be inconveniences (suboptimal execution speed one of them, but I fear others as well) for people using G4 machines. G5 machines have enough extra processing power to cope with this, so I wouldn't be concerned if PowerBook featured a G5, but the slowly-but-certainly aging G4 is a different story altogether now that the prospect of a new PowerBook line with a different CPU is on horizont.
What makes live matter live is the complexity of its organization. A rock (or for that matter, a star) is a remarkably simple lump of molecules, while a living being is a remarkably complex object, being organized from multiple layers, each built on top of another (molecules, subcell objects, cells, tissues, organs). All this complexity is assembled in a manner that allows it -- when placed in right environment -- to respond to its environment, selfreproduce, run basic mind processes in its brain, or even higher level mind processes (the emergent exophenomenon of these processes being what we usually call "personality", which I believe is similarly layered in its build as the organism is, with electrical impulses between neurons being the lowest level, and several layers, each more complex than the previous one built atop of it).
Compare a 1MB file full of zeros (or even binary white noise) to a 1MB file containing a binary of an operating system kernel. It's the exact order of zeros and ones in the latter that makes it much more useful when executed in an appropriate environment. I hope you get the analogy.
Seems like once in a lifetime, I have a sig that's on topic.
BTW, I believe that psychological identity is just an illusion. We are what we remember. Therefore, our personality changes with every new event we observe. It's really a philosophical question how long can we assume to hold the same identity. I don't consider myself to be the same person I was ten years ago, or for that matter, an hour ago. We usually assume however that the minor changes happening over time preserve "identity". It's like the difference between replacing one picture on your computer's screen with another versus slowly morphing one into the other, with adjacent morphing stages being almost invisibly different from one another. Yet, you can still morph any picture into any other. Similarly, you can have an innocent child grow to become a tyrant (and no, I'm absolutely no Star Wars fan). Still the same person? Think about it.
We usually bind identity of a person to its physical body, because that's how usually those things are. Once we get technologically advanced enough that we are no longer limited by the one-to-one relation of bodies to minds (or even require a biological brain to run our mind processes), the philosophy (and law!) will certainly gain a nice new topic they can gnaw on for some time.
The legal issues themselves would be interesting. Would a copy not running inside a biological brain be considered a person and a citizen? Would a copy running inside another biological brain (and associated body) also own the property the original owns? If personality is digitally copiable, then who (and under what definition of identity) owns the copyright?
Use Microsoft's API for rendering portions of components (5106661).
and
Use GTK API for rendering portions of components (6185456). After fixing 6185456 Swing components will use GTK's rendering engine...
ROTFL. After years of Swing fanboys bashing IBM for daring using native OS rendering for UI widgets in their SWT toolkit (in contrast with Swings alleged the-only-right-and-holy-way of drawing everything in Java in name of "Java purity"), they seem to have finally gave up the futile attempts to imitate native OS and Swing will now delegate part of its rendering to the *gasp* _native_ rendering engines. I really wonder how can it be noone in the Swing camp cries desecration...:-)
Rumors of life outside academia are just that, mere rumors. I only half believe.
I actually belong primarily to the IT industry, and am trying to make my way through a Ph.D. program on the sides. Each world has its own attractive as well as the dark sides. My mental inclination is such that I'm more at home in the industry; probably for not totally unrelated reasons all my scientific efforts happen to fall into the "applied" portion of the computer science arena. There's not necessarily a clear cut line distinguishing the two worlds -- at least from what I see at my local university, there are lots of joint projects with big name companies (Nokia, Siemens, etc.). Looks like though you have found your way in the environment and are feeling good in it -- wishing you good luck with it.
Sure:-) That's exactly what I do when I'm working with someone on a scientific paper. I could hardly pull this off with someone not in academia, though...
Microsoft is not required for the industry to form a consensus.
True. I'm just sceptical about the wide spread of a new format (not supported by MS) among users as long as the majority of users equal "computer-prepared text document" with a Microsoft Word document.
You think MS is happy about
supporting PDFs?
Certainly not. PDF is one of reasons living without MS Office is viable today - at least in my case. I myself use Open Office exclusively, and find that in majority of cases exporting to PDF when I need to share a document with someone is more than sufficient - except when I'd expect the receiving party to edit it, which I think happened exactly once since I stopped using MS Office (more than a year now). On that occasion, I did hit some problems with.doc export in Ooo (something to do with exported.doc not restarting numbering in the second numbered list and continuing the numbering of the previous one instead), but.rtf saved the day:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You're late: http://www.lunarembassy.com/
Just check it out for yourself at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1870342,00.as p
Gotta find a system with 512 KB RAM and DOS 3.1 somewhere...
Wow. It used to be other way around. I'm calling the Greenpeace to ask Google to donate the technology for turning books into trees to them. Then all we have to do is send all junk literature to Amazonas, and presto -- rain forests saved! I'm eagerly awaiting worldpeace.google.com shortly after this one.
FP
Same here. I was buying lot more CDs when they weren't crippled. The thought of the CD being crippled automatically makes me not want to buy it. This all gradually led to me completely losing the interest in even browsing the CD stands at malls -- whenever I got to one, I bought 3 CDs on average, but I haven't done it for at least a year now, as I was frustrated by the proliferation of crippled CDs. I have a +150 collection of CDs dating from times when the whole thing wasn't screwed up royally. Interpolating the tendency shows that they did lose quite many sales to me. Such is life. I guess they'll just write me off as "not buying anymore because he pirates" in their statistics, but in reality I don't have a single MP3 anywhere, either legal or illegal. I exclusively listen to the radio and my old CDs in sort of a spontaneous passive resistance against CD crippling for some time now.
Just out of curiosity, I scooped the OS X games on Amazon, and there's lot of them (you can say that I'm a wannabe Mac switcher myself). I was relieved to know that I won't have to miss nor Sim City 4 nor Civilization III if I switch (although unlike Blizzard titles, I'll have to separately purchase the Mac version). Doom III is also available. So, it's not so bleak when it comes to games. Other than that, I'm seriously entertaining the idea of giving up gaming on my PC altogether. There's just too many things I depend on for living on my primary machine to keep lots of unrelated gunk installed on it. I'm seriously considering buying an Xbox for my Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory needs (played the demo on PC and got rather interested). As well as for Halo 2, of course.
Not true. I recently submitted a story about Doom running on iPod and they rejected it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/10/ipod_doom/
In an anonymous system, the key is the identity. The man-in-the-middle can discredit his own private key, but he still can't discredit the original author's private key. People will attribute credibility to a key, based on the history of what was earlier published signed with that key. In such a setup, merely acting as a copycat of another person for a while and then diverting from it won't hurt the credibility of the original person.
Nope. But it would cause FireFox to present the dialog box that the screenshot presented.
I don't think it suddenly disconnected. More likely is that it returned HTTP 204 "No Content" response.
My results:
IE6: space and enter can't push the button
Opera8 (my primary browser): tab can't select the button.
Sheesh...
Amen. My latest (and last - switching to Apple) x86 PC laptop has all kinds of issues - doesn't wake up from standby twice in every three occasions (must be rebooted), hangs with USB2.0 enabled (must be rebooted) etc. The hardware manufacturer blames Microsoft, Microsoft blames the hardware manufacturer. The PC world of separated hardware and OS vendors is flawed from the user's point of view, as the hardware is worthless without an OS, and the OS is worthless without the hardware. I'm looking forward to entering the Apple world, where if something doesn't work, I only have a single party to take the responsibility, instead of two that pass the buck one to another.
What worries me is the end of a certain status quo. Before yesterday, PowerBook G4 was to be the top line of Apple laptops for a longer foreseeable future, knowing that engineering difficulties pretty much made a G5 PowerBook impossible. So, software engineers at Apple and elsewhere would be forced by this fact (at least that's what I was hoping for until yesterday) to carefully develop their software so that it runs efficiently on a G4, because that's what's ticking in Apple's top-o'-the-line laptop. If Leopard or the next version of iLife or whatever else software turns out to run like a lame dog on a G4 PowerBook, that'd be bad for them, because they couldn't tell you to upgrade, because there's nothing to upgrade to. Hence, they'd probably bend backwards to make sure the software runs fast on it in the first place.
Now however, one year down the line, they can just tell me that it runs fine on the Pentium-M PowerBook and that I really should upgrade my old outdated G4 piece of junk. So, what I'm afraid of is that future software releases will be tuned to run fast on x86 first (and maybe G5 second, but I'm not really holding my breath for that), but there'll be inconveniences (suboptimal execution speed one of them, but I fear others as well) for people using G4 machines. G5 machines have enough extra processing power to cope with this, so I wouldn't be concerned if PowerBook featured a G5, but the slowly-but-certainly aging G4 is a different story altogether now that the prospect of a new PowerBook line with a different CPU is on horizont.
Yeah, whatever. What am I to do if I wanted to buy my first PowerBook (and my first Mac) *this month*? Screw it. the world is so unjust...
What makes live matter live is the complexity of its organization. A rock (or for that matter, a star) is a remarkably simple lump of molecules, while a living being is a remarkably complex object, being organized from multiple layers, each built on top of another (molecules, subcell objects, cells, tissues, organs). All this complexity is assembled in a manner that allows it -- when placed in right environment -- to respond to its environment, selfreproduce, run basic mind processes in its brain, or even higher level mind processes (the emergent exophenomenon of these processes being what we usually call "personality", which I believe is similarly layered in its build as the organism is, with electrical impulses between neurons being the lowest level, and several layers, each more complex than the previous one built atop of it).
Compare a 1MB file full of zeros (or even binary white noise) to a 1MB file containing a binary of an operating system kernel. It's the exact order of zeros and ones in the latter that makes it much more useful when executed in an appropriate environment. I hope you get the analogy.
Seems like once in a lifetime, I have a sig that's on topic.
BTW, I believe that psychological identity is just an illusion. We are what we remember. Therefore, our personality changes with every new event we observe. It's really a philosophical question how long can we assume to hold the same identity. I don't consider myself to be the same person I was ten years ago, or for that matter, an hour ago. We usually assume however that the minor changes happening over time preserve "identity". It's like the difference between replacing one picture on your computer's screen with another versus slowly morphing one into the other, with adjacent morphing stages being almost invisibly different from one another. Yet, you can still morph any picture into any other. Similarly, you can have an innocent child grow to become a tyrant (and no, I'm absolutely no Star Wars fan). Still the same person? Think about it.
We usually bind identity of a person to its physical body, because that's how usually those things are. Once we get technologically advanced enough that we are no longer limited by the one-to-one relation of bodies to minds (or even require a biological brain to run our mind processes), the philosophy (and law!) will certainly gain a nice new topic they can gnaw on for some time.
The legal issues themselves would be interesting. Would a copy not running inside a biological brain be considered a person and a citizen? Would a copy running inside another biological brain (and associated body) also own the property the original owns? If personality is digitally copiable, then who (and under what definition of identity) owns the copyright?
It'll truly be a futurological singularity.
Bring Swing's GTK file chooser up to date with recent changes to GTK's file chooser (5090726).
Use Microsoft's API for rendering portions of components (5106661).
and
Use GTK API for rendering portions of components (6185456). After fixing 6185456 Swing components will use GTK's rendering engine...
ROTFL. After years of Swing fanboys bashing IBM for daring using native OS rendering for UI widgets in their SWT toolkit (in contrast with Swings alleged the-only-right-and-holy-way of drawing everything in Java in name of "Java purity"), they seem to have finally gave up the futile attempts to imitate native OS and Swing will now delegate part of its rendering to the *gasp* _native_ rendering engines. I really wonder how can it be noone in the Swing camp cries desecration... :-)
Nope... somebody mod me offtopic :-)
Maybe I was lucky?
I actually belong primarily to the IT industry, and am trying to make my way through a Ph.D. program on the sides. Each world has its own attractive as well as the dark sides. My mental inclination is such that I'm more at home in the industry; probably for not totally unrelated reasons all my scientific efforts happen to fall into the "applied" portion of the computer science arena. There's not necessarily a clear cut line distinguishing the two worlds -- at least from what I see at my local university, there are lots of joint projects with big name companies (Nokia, Siemens, etc.). Looks like though you have found your way in the environment and are feeling good in it -- wishing you good luck with it.
Sure :-) That's exactly what I do when I'm working with someone on a scientific paper. I could hardly pull this off with someone not in academia, though...
True. I'm just sceptical about the wide spread of a new format (not supported by MS) among users as long as the majority of users equal "computer-prepared text document" with a Microsoft Word document.
You think MS is happy about supporting PDFs?
Certainly not. PDF is one of reasons living without MS Office is viable today - at least in my case. I myself use Open Office exclusively, and find that in majority of cases exporting to PDF when I need to share a document with someone is more than sufficient - except when I'd expect the receiving party to edit it, which I think happened exactly once since I stopped using MS Office (more than a year now). On that occasion, I did hit some problems with .doc export in Ooo (something to do with exported .doc not restarting numbering in the second numbered list and continuing the numbering of the previous one instead), but .rtf saved the day :-)
The sad truth is that it'll probably only catch on after Microsoft decides to support it in the next version of the Office.