This would give newbies an easy way of using the power of the command line from an easy environment.
Apple did something like this a long time ago in A/UX. There was a tool called "Commando" which gave you a command-line GUI.
("A what?" you say?)
A GUI for your command line tools. Seriously. Type, say, "ls" and hit the MagicCommandoKeystroke (Cmd-K). You get a nice Mac dialog box with check boxes ("long output format") and radio buttons ("sort by: filename modtime etc") and at the bottom of the dialog box, it builds a command line for you. Hit enter (or click "OK") and it runs it.
It was great, because it let you use the command line for the stuff you remembered, and was faster than "man" for the weird once-a-year flags you don't use regularly. (I didn't use it for "ls" much.:-)
I was seriously hoping to see it back in Mac OS X. No such luck.
Personally, I wasn't counting on WEP anyway, which is why I didn't bother buying the Lucent Gold cards. I just wish IPsec were more common, so that I wouldn't have to tunnel quite so much through ssh.
Of course, then there are unencrypted wireless networks like the ones at USENIX. Dug Song's presentation on dsniff was a big hit; look for the "Passwords Found on a Wireless Network" paper. (PostScript only, sorry.)
I would like to support the EFF, but I am a guest in the US (non-resident alien), and as such have reservations about participating in the American political process.
First off, as a 501(c)3 the EFF can't do as much lobbying as a "real" political action group, so contributions are not considered campaign/political donations.
Second, the MPAA doesn't seem to care if you're a US citizen or not; just ask Jon Johansen!
The DVD issue at hand is a worldwide issue. (CSS exists to enforce region codes, among other things.) The fight happens to be taking place in the US, but that doesn't mean it's not going to affect the rest of the world...so affect it right back.
I can't get tax relief donating to a US entity (I'm an EU citizen...from Ireland), so is their any other means by which I can maximise the effectiveness of my few ?
Electronic Frontier Ireland is probably worth looking into, then. Perhaps you can get a tax break by donating to them? I don't know how active they are, but it can't hurt to send them a note and ask if they have suggestions.
You can also still donate to the EFF, you just won't get the tax break. (Though at least in the US tax law, if you're poor, you generally want to just take the "standard deduction" anyway, which means you wouldn't get a tax break for charitable donations.)
Don't forget to join and support the EFF. The MPAA has plenty of money from selling all those VHS tapes, DVDs, movie tickets, etc. The EFF only has what we can give it.
Broke? Student/low income membership is $20. That's what, three pizzas from the cheap pizza parlor? Two CDs? A month of saving a buck a day by skipping that vending machine soda every weekday....
Not broke? Got stock that is still worth more than you paid for it at the IPO? Need a tax deduction? They're a registered nonprofit.
Lazy? They take Visa and Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, and a bunch of other options. If you'll shop online for your music, books, games, hardware...how about shopping online for your rights?
The book is Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer by Gordon Thygeson, January 1998. The book's web site is, logically enough, http://www.appletshirts.com/.
Unfortunately the web site says that holiday shipments will be made on "Monday, December 20th" implying that the last update to the site was in late 1999...so I don't know if it's still available.
Business Method Patents Northwest (you know who I mean:-) says it ships in "2-3 days", if you trust their estimates.
I got an ad for the Dulux, sent to an old spamtrap address. Looks like more proof (as if any were needed) that if you have to spam to advertise your "product", it's probably garbage and/or totally bogus.
...does his argument have a strong flavor of "we must protect the stupid from themselves"?
He says "People assume that what they read on the Net is true." Yet the Boston Globe has published articles that said that Tacoma was north of Seattle, and England west of Ireland. Were those mistakes any less mistakes for being published on dead trees (as well as the Globe's web site, of course)? No.
"We should openly recognize that many Net users do not possess the technical skills to detect such deceptions; therefore they need help, just as they need help with radio and television." In other words, there are people who are too stupid to tell that "Blair Witch Project" wasn't a documentary [he uses that example] so we must make it illegal to fool them.
"If we have a government agency continuously making sure that supposed research presented on the Internet is factual; if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact); and if all images, data and text have to be accompanied by authorship or provenance information, or simply can't be posted; if these and many similar rules are laid down -- I think you can begin to get a picture of the very different kind of Net that would ensue." Yeah, it'd be different all right; no Slashdot, for example. ("That link isn't to a picture of the monolith in Seattle, but to something else! Take your site down or be arrested!")
(Disclaimer: my day job is as a sysadmin at one of the Human Genome Project centers, but I'm not a biologist or bioinformatics specialist.)
First off, as others have noted, the human genome isn't "completed"--the draft version is "substantially complete," which in genomics terms means about 85% complete with lower than expected quality and lots of gaps. (Actual finished-to-the-full-spec sequence is about 33%, and an additional third is "deep shotgun" which is good quality with some gaps.) That doesn't make it "not useful", it just means that the whole thing isn't finished yet. This will obviously delay the availability of specific applications developed based on the data.
Second, as another poster has mentioned, it's not exactly practical to do genetics experiments on humans. Even if you ignored the ethical and legal problems involved, generations are too long. Fruit flies, plants, and mice are much easier to experiment with, especially when you're trying to figure out what a specific gene does when it's mutated or disabled. Those experiments can then be used to guide research into homologous genes in humans.
Third, there's the whole area of comparative genomics. As I mentioned above, it's much easier to figure out what a gene does when you can experiment with it and compare it to similar genes in other organisms. The more organisms you have, the more useful comparisons you can make.
Finally, it's still early days for genomics. The completion of the human draft sequence was not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. To use your example of "a progran that could recover ANY windows crash" it's closer to the situation where we now have a hex dump of all of Windows 2000; quick! Debug it! Make it work better! Now imagine that instead of having code that's been consciously (arguably even "intelligently" at times:-) designed by multiple people since 1980 or so, it's code that's been hacked on by nature for millions of years...written for an architecture you have no instruction set list for...and uses all those self-modifying code tricks that old copy protection schemes had. Have fun!
bandolier with that Palm, cell phone, pager, MP3 player, Leatherman, along with a MagLite and batteries (AAA & AA) filling
the rest like ammo would be cool. Sort of a Nerd Rambo effect.
Check out e-Holster. Not quite the same thing (it's more for those "I wanna look like a geek FBI agent" moments:-) but fills a similar need.
And, yes, I'm getting to the point where I need a Sam Browne belt for all my gear. Cell phone, pager, Palm, Swiss Army knife--and that's just the everyday stuff! There's also the GPS, the digital camera, the walkie-talkie, the MP3 player....
Mobilestar, that's the name I was trying to remember. I had also forgotten about Wayport; thanks for noting them.
I guess that proves my original point even more, though; 3 companies working on the market for airport 802.11 connectivity means that deployment should be very quick once they all get going.
802.11, with the boost of Apple's AirPort, has started really taking off (pun intended). USENIX conferences have had Wavelan or Aironet (now Cisco) gear available for a couple years now, and it's wildly popular; now, Aerzone (which used to be Laptop Lane) has partnered with Delta, and they are starting to offer 802.11 service in airports (the ones with airplanes, not the plastic flying saucers). I think American has a deal with another company, but I can't remember the name of that one.
The nice thing, of course, is that since it's wireless, you don't necessarily need to be in the lounge to get a signal; so next time you're in the vicinity of a Crown Room or Admiral's Club, see if you have any signal.
For that matter, just see if you see any wireless LANs around home! When we set ours up, it turned out that a couple companies across the street showed up in the choice of networks pop-up menu....
Bush understands that you don't just piss on the constitution when its convenient.
This is the same guy who said "there should be limits to freedom" when his campaign website got parodied. First Amendment defender? Hah. Not that Gore's record is really any better.
i just
don't want to waste my vote. does nader have any real chance of winning?
A few historical precedents to consider when thinking about "wasted" votes:
Eugene V. Debs never won an election--but most if not all of the Socialist party platform eventually got enacted. Why? Because the Big Two saw his vote totals, and co-opted the issues so they could rake in those voters.
John Anderson managed to affect the first Reagan term somewhat--after getting just over 5%.
Ross Perot didn't win either, but at least he raised the issue of the deficit.
States are almost all winner-take-all in the Electoral College. If you're in a state that isn't a swing state (most of them), your vote is wasted
anyway; even if you do, the chance that your one vote will make the difference is near-nil. I live in Massachusetts. Gore will win here; Bush knows he doesn't have a chance. I can vote for Bush, Gore, Nader, Buchanan, Browne, Hagelin, or whoever I want and the chance of it having a direct effect on the outcome is zero. But if Browne, say, gets a couple percent, Nader gets a few percent, etc--then we're sending a message to the Big Two that there's some alternative. They might even wind up paying attention!
In my case, AT&T slammed me just as I was leaving on vacation. My existing LD company (Sprint), logically enough for them, cancelled my calling card because it no longer had an account to be attached to. I tried to use it, and got rejected...while 1000 miles from home. Fun!
Luckily, Sprint was nice about it, understood completely, and fixed up the card. When I got home, I complained to both NYNEX (as they were calling themselves at the time) and AT&T, and eventually wound up with both of them refunding the $5 LD carrier change fees...meaning that I actually made a few bucks for my trouble. Shame it wound up being less than minimum wage for all the time I spent getting it fixed....
It's going to be. The Epcot attraction Mission: Space, sponsored by Compaq, is scheduled to open in 2003. "Offering guests a one-of-a-kind ``astronaut-like'' experience, Mission: SPACE will
launch guests into a simulated space adventure -- from pulse-racing lift-off to weightlessness in outer space."
No word yet on whether it will be running Linux, Tru64 Unix, VMS, or Windows NT.
The continued shambling of the Amiga name reminds me of the airline industry. "Pan Am" was a world-spanning airline which launched the 747, built airfields and operations from nothing on Pacific islands, etc etc etc. Now the name is owned by an airline that flies from second-tier airports to half a dozen cities.
Not to mention the three incarnations of Braniff, the multiple Midways, and so on.
I've borrowed this CD-ROM from a friend and, to my annoyance, I find there doesn't seem to be any decent way to
read the annotated Fire on Linux...and even on Windows it kind of sucks. Does anyone have any solutions?
You might try hacking something together using rtftohtml. I haven't tried it, but it claims to handle footnotes by turning them into hyperlinks, and the RTF version of the annotations are implemented as footnotes. There also seems to be a newer shareware RTFtoHTML, which I did just try (Mac version)--the footnotes get implemented as links to HTML anchors at the end of each chapter, which is a little painful to jump back and forth with.
The Windows version of the annotations didn't impress me that much when I tried it, either, but I was running it under Virtual PC. My method for reading the annotations was to load them into MS Word (given the date, I think it was v4.0) on a Mac, which worked fairly well; it would scroll the footnote pane to keep it in sync with the main text pane. (For that matter, you could use MS Word as a really expensive RTF to HTML translator:-). Word 98 now turns the footnotes into pop-up tooltips (which is a good way to do annotations), but in the pop-ups it messes up the line breaks. You can't win 'em all.
Of course, the other other option is just to read the raw RTF; it's not that ugly once you reflow it.
Since China Mountain Zhang was also a Hugo nominee that year, it was made available, in its entirety, along with a short QuickTime movie of Maureen McHugh giving pronunciation tips for those of us not fortunate enough to speak any Chinese dialect, and her reading of the beginning of the novel.
(That CD-ROM is a great toy for SF-loving geeks. No, you can't have mine, it's not for sale.)
Since Time Warner's media properties are predominantly liberal-biased, AOL's just doing their part to make the post-merger corporate average bias more centrist.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple did something like this a long time ago in A/UX. There was a tool called "Commando" which gave you a command-line GUI.
("A what?" you say?)
A GUI for your command line tools. Seriously. Type, say, "ls" and hit the MagicCommandoKeystroke (Cmd-K). You get a nice Mac dialog box with check boxes ("long output format") and radio buttons ("sort by: filename modtime etc") and at the bottom of the dialog box, it builds a command line for you. Hit enter (or click "OK") and it runs it.
It was great, because it let you use the command line for the stuff you remembered, and was faster than "man" for the weird once-a-year flags you don't use regularly. (I didn't use it for "ls" much. :-)
I was seriously hoping to see it back in Mac OS X. No such luck.
Some information about their analysis is available.
Personally, I wasn't counting on WEP anyway, which is why I didn't bother buying the Lucent Gold cards. I just wish IPsec were more common, so that I wouldn't have to tunnel quite so much through ssh.
Of course, then there are unencrypted wireless networks like the ones at USENIX. Dug Song's presentation on dsniff was a big hit; look for the "Passwords Found on a Wireless Network" paper. (PostScript only, sorry.)
First off, as a 501(c)3 the EFF can't do as much lobbying as a "real" political action group, so contributions are not considered campaign/political donations.
Second, the MPAA doesn't seem to care if you're a US citizen or not; just ask Jon Johansen!
The DVD issue at hand is a worldwide issue. (CSS exists to enforce region codes, among other things.) The fight happens to be taking place in the US, but that doesn't mean it's not going to affect the rest of the world...so affect it right back.
Electronic Frontier Ireland is probably worth looking into, then. Perhaps you can get a tax break by donating to them? I don't know how active they are, but it can't hurt to send them a note and ask if they have suggestions.
You can also still donate to the EFF, you just won't get the tax break. (Though at least in the US tax law, if you're poor, you generally want to just take the "standard deduction" anyway, which means you wouldn't get a tax break for charitable donations.)
Don't forget to join and support the EFF. The MPAA has plenty of money from selling all those VHS tapes, DVDs, movie tickets, etc. The EFF only has what we can give it.
Broke? Student/low income membership is $20. That's what, three pizzas from the cheap pizza parlor? Two CDs? A month of saving a buck a day by skipping that vending machine soda every weekday....
Not broke? Got stock that is still worth more than you paid for it at the IPO? Need a tax deduction? They're a registered nonprofit.
Lazy? They take Visa and Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, and a bunch of other options. If you'll shop online for your music, books, games, hardware...how about shopping online for your rights?
(And see if your employer might match your donation.)
The book is Apple T-Shirts: A Yearbook of History at Apple Computer by Gordon Thygeson, January 1998. The book's web site is, logically enough, http://www.appletshirts.com/.
Unfortunately the web site says that holiday shipments will be made on "Monday, December 20th" implying that the last update to the site was in late 1999...so I don't know if it's still available.
Business Method Patents Northwest (you know who I mean :-) says it ships in "2-3 days", if you trust their estimates.
I got an ad for the Dulux, sent to an old spamtrap address. Looks like more proof (as if any were needed) that if you have to spam to advertise your "product", it's probably garbage and/or totally bogus.
...does his argument have a strong flavor of "we must protect the stupid from themselves"?
He says "People assume that what they read on the Net is true." Yet the Boston Globe has published articles that said that Tacoma was north of Seattle, and England west of Ireland. Were those mistakes any less mistakes for being published on dead trees (as well as the Globe's web site, of course)? No.
"We should openly recognize that many Net users do not possess the technical skills to detect such deceptions; therefore they need help, just as they need help with radio and television." In other words, there are people who are too stupid to tell that "Blair Witch Project" wasn't a documentary [he uses that example] so we must make it illegal to fool them.
"If we have a government agency continuously making sure that supposed research presented on the Internet is factual; if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact); and if all images, data and text have to be accompanied by authorship or provenance information, or simply can't be posted; if these and many similar rules are laid down -- I think you can begin to get a picture of the very different kind of Net that would ensue." Yeah, it'd be different all right; no Slashdot, for example. ("That link isn't to a picture of the monolith in Seattle, but to something else! Take your site down or be arrested!")
(Disclaimer: my day job is as a sysadmin at one of the Human Genome Project centers, but I'm not a biologist or bioinformatics specialist.)
First off, as others have noted, the human genome isn't "completed"--the draft version is "substantially complete," which in genomics terms means about 85% complete with lower than expected quality and lots of gaps. (Actual finished-to-the-full-spec sequence is about 33%, and an additional third is "deep shotgun" which is good quality with some gaps.) That doesn't make it "not useful", it just means that the whole thing isn't finished yet. This will obviously delay the availability of specific applications developed based on the data.
Second, as another poster has mentioned, it's not exactly practical to do genetics experiments on humans. Even if you ignored the ethical and legal problems involved, generations are too long. Fruit flies, plants, and mice are much easier to experiment with, especially when you're trying to figure out what a specific gene does when it's mutated or disabled. Those experiments can then be used to guide research into homologous genes in humans.
Third, there's the whole area of comparative genomics. As I mentioned above, it's much easier to figure out what a gene does when you can experiment with it and compare it to similar genes in other organisms. The more organisms you have, the more useful comparisons you can make.
Finally, it's still early days for genomics. The completion of the human draft sequence was not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. To use your example of "a progran that could recover ANY windows crash" it's closer to the situation where we now have a hex dump of all of Windows 2000; quick! Debug it! Make it work better! Now imagine that instead of having code that's been consciously (arguably even "intelligently" at times :-) designed by multiple people since 1980 or so, it's code that's been hacked on by nature for millions of years...written for an architecture you have no instruction set list for...and uses all those self-modifying code tricks that old copy protection schemes had. Have fun!
Check out e-Holster. Not quite the same thing (it's more for those "I wanna look like a geek FBI agent" moments :-) but fills a similar need.
And, yes, I'm getting to the point where I need a Sam Browne belt for all my gear. Cell phone, pager, Palm, Swiss Army knife--and that's just the everyday stuff! There's also the GPS, the digital camera, the walkie-talkie, the MP3 player....
Quoth the "Open Source Tripwire for Linux FAQ":
Of course, since the open source release is GPLed, porting it to other OSes is perfectly legitimate.
Mobilestar, that's the name I was trying to remember. I had also forgotten about Wayport; thanks for noting them.
I guess that proves my original point even more, though; 3 companies working on the market for airport 802.11 connectivity means that deployment should be very quick once they all get going.
802.11, with the boost of Apple's AirPort, has started really taking off (pun intended). USENIX conferences have had Wavelan or Aironet (now Cisco) gear available for a couple years now, and it's wildly popular; now, Aerzone (which used to be Laptop Lane) has partnered with Delta, and they are starting to offer 802.11 service in airports (the ones with airplanes, not the plastic flying saucers). I think American has a deal with another company, but I can't remember the name of that one.
The nice thing, of course, is that since it's wireless, you don't necessarily need to be in the lounge to get a signal; so next time you're in the vicinity of a Crown Room or Admiral's Club, see if you have any signal.
For that matter, just see if you see any wireless LANs around home! When we set ours up, it turned out that a couple companies across the street showed up in the choice of networks pop-up menu....
http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/daily/10/17/who _invented_internet.html is the real link; hopefully SlashCode won't the "insert random spaces" game with this post.
Bush understands that you don't just piss on the constitution when its convenient.
This is the same guy who said "there should be limits to freedom" when his campaign website got parodied. First Amendment defender? Hah. Not that Gore's record is really any better.
i just don't want to waste my vote. does nader have any real chance of winning?
A few historical precedents to consider when thinking about "wasted" votes:
States are almost all winner-take-all in the Electoral College. If you're in a state that isn't a swing state (most of them), your vote is wasted anyway; even if you do, the chance that your one vote will make the difference is near-nil. I live in Massachusetts. Gore will win here; Bush knows he doesn't have a chance. I can vote for Bush, Gore, Nader, Buchanan, Browne, Hagelin, or whoever I want and the chance of it having a direct effect on the outcome is zero. But if Browne, say, gets a couple percent, Nader gets a few percent, etc--then we're sending a message to the Big Two that there's some alternative. They might even wind up paying attention!
http://www.richmond.edu/jolt/v7i1/n ote 2.html is what you're looking for.
In my case, AT&T slammed me just as I was leaving on vacation. My existing LD company (Sprint), logically enough for them, cancelled my calling card because it no longer had an account to be attached to. I tried to use it, and got rejected...while 1000 miles from home. Fun!
Luckily, Sprint was nice about it, understood completely, and fixed up the card. When I got home, I complained to both NYNEX (as they were calling themselves at the time) and AT&T, and eventually wound up with both of them refunding the $5 LD carrier change fees...meaning that I actually made a few bucks for my trouble. Shame it wound up being less than minimum wage for all the time I spent getting it fixed....
sounds like a ride at Disney World.
It's going to be. The Epcot attraction Mission: Space, sponsored by Compaq, is scheduled to open in 2003. "Offering guests a one-of-a-kind ``astronaut-like'' experience, Mission: SPACE will launch guests into a simulated space adventure -- from pulse-racing lift-off to weightlessness in outer space."
No word yet on whether it will be running Linux, Tru64 Unix, VMS, or Windows NT.
The continued shambling of the Amiga name reminds me of the airline industry. "Pan Am" was a world-spanning airline which launched the 747, built airfields and operations from nothing on Pacific islands, etc etc etc. Now the name is owned by an airline that flies from second-tier airports to half a dozen cities.
Not to mention the three incarnations of Braniff, the multiple Midways, and so on.
Hey, I remember when Gopher came along. It was a great improvement over anonymous ftp, after all!
So since Gopher was named after the UMN mascot, why wasn't the World Wide Web named "Collider" or something like that? :-)
Not if you own a Mac. Q3A is a three platform game, guys....
You might try hacking something together using rtftohtml. I haven't tried it, but it claims to handle footnotes by turning them into hyperlinks, and the RTF version of the annotations are implemented as footnotes. There also seems to be a newer shareware RTFtoHTML, which I did just try (Mac version)--the footnotes get implemented as links to HTML anchors at the end of each chapter, which is a little painful to jump back and forth with.
The Windows version of the annotations didn't impress me that much when I tried it, either, but I was running it under Virtual PC. My method for reading the annotations was to load them into MS Word (given the date, I think it was v4.0) on a Mac, which worked fairly well; it would scroll the footnote pane to keep it in sync with the main text pane. (For that matter, you could use MS Word as a really expensive RTF to HTML translator :-). Word 98 now turns the footnotes into pop-up tooltips (which is a good way to do annotations), but in the pop-ups it messes up the line breaks. You can't win 'em all.
Of course, the other other option is just to read the raw RTF; it's not that ugly once you reflow it.
The famous-on-USENET and now hard to find "annotated CD-ROM of A Fire Upon the Deep " was actually an anthology of all the 1993 Hugo nominees, put together by Brad Templeton (then of ClariNet, and now Chairman of the Board for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Since China Mountain Zhang was also a Hugo nominee that year, it was made available, in its entirety, along with a short QuickTime movie of Maureen McHugh giving pronunciation tips for those of us not fortunate enough to speak any Chinese dialect, and her reading of the beginning of the novel.
(That CD-ROM is a great toy for SF-loving geeks. No, you can't have mine, it's not for sale.)
Since Time Warner's media properties are predominantly liberal-biased, AOL's just doing their part to make the post-merger corporate average bias more centrist.