Unfortunately spammers are ahead of you. Here's what I get thousands of times daily: http://generatia9.info/razvan/dealing.gif It's an animated.gif which includes some small "noise" bits. It would surely bypass your OCR software. Should you adapt to catch this, they will probably find something else. I'm not saying you won't hurt them should you succeed, but consider this: you design your OCR software to analyze every frame in an animated.gif, to catch the offending text. What if the spammer uses the simple sprite-based animation to move pieces of text around? You honestly don't stand a chance. Of course, this is from my very limited experience with the gif format. Any suggestions on catching these are warmly welcome.
c:\>copy c:\win311 + c:\winnt35 + c:\progra~1\intern~1 + c:\progra~1\window~1 + c:\micros~1.net c:\vista would me more appropriate;) Except copy doesn't have a recursive switch and xcopy can't do multiple sources:p
.. as a good marketing approach. Skip the 2.0 branch entirely. Don't release it to the public, don't even announce it. Work on 3.0, praise the new Gecko, get some (any) solution to the memory leaks. That's it.
It is really hard to build new Hydro plants because people are concerned about the environmental impact. When I livedin the northwest, I heard lots of talk about people wanting to get rid of the hydro dams because they believe it would be beneficial to salmon. (This seems NUTS to me.)
Well, this doesn't seem too strange to me (mind you, I don't live in the US and the only things I know about salmon are from the Discovery Channel). Let's suppose salmon goes up some river to lay eggs and fertilize. If someone decides "Hey, let's build a dam here and produce electrons" no such fish will ever again reach the mating grounds dictated by its instincts. Of course, there are other rivers. But the salmon swims to the birth place, reproduces (if lucky) and then dies. Should such a dam appear, there will be no fish going back to the others "doodz, up that stream there is trouble". Basically, those weird mating rituals plus a concrete wall placed on the wrong river means a huge part of salmon population will disappear within one year. This is sad, and really requires some thinking and a call to Greenpeace before building.
Re:But what if Microsoft offered it all together?
on
Windows vs Mac Security
·
· Score: 1, Troll
So Apple allows Dell to sell custom-designed hardware and bundle Firefox with their OEM version of OS X?
ONLY 13.8 million USD? From weekend screenings? Just how much is a dollar worth these days is that is a low income? I was just reading lately about the Monty Python movies and figures like these were quoted:
"And Now For Something Completely Different (1971) \n The Pythons made this film for about 80,000 (GBP)"
and
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) \n This film was also shot in about five weeks on a budget of just under 230,000 (GBP)"
Those are movies that created a part of entertainment history and will be watched again and again for decades. How much money will those productions generate? The authors/producers will maybe be able to make an estimate 30 years from now, when I and my children will have purchased them (on DVD:P ) and hopefully my grandchildren will find the witty irony of the Monty Python to be obsolete and no longer reflecting the daily reality.
On the other hand, wtf is "Snakes on the net"? Never heard of it, most likely no-one will know what this movie was about in 3 weeks. They should be glad clever marketing brought them a large financial revenue and remember: quality is not directly proportional with market value.
I fail to se how you could run Fedora5 and Windows 2003 4 years ago, also - at that time - no matter what guest/host OS you had you ran WMVare 1.x server or were a very early adopter of 2.0 (July 2002). VMWare 1.x was far from a speedy or stable solution, so I can only salute you for creating such a stable setup.
Unfortunately, you are wrong. "eg" (exempli gratia) means "for example",but "ie" (id est - such is or idem quod - identical to) means "an exact example of the aforementioned situation/object/person/whatever".
I will personally disagree with your opinion. I have never been able to produce any quality results in exams (or at work, later) unless being under stress. Stress == adrenaline for me. Without it, I'm just the usual office slacker. Not caring about the outcome of a project is hardly an incentive to get it done, and get it right. With these in mind, an advice on how to keep a clear mind while trembling like a leaf in front of the examiners would be welcome. A (most likely stupid, and surely dangerous) solution for me and a lot of colleagues has been to take a light painkiller like Nurofen. No other bright ideas from me though.. just learned to live with the feeling.
Off-topic note: please relax on the "installs cookies" issue: it is a tracking method - yes. There are also other far more reliable methods which achieve the same purpose. Your only way of escaping tracking now is to #1 Block cookies (of course) #2 Disable any form of scripting (easy) #3 If that is not feasible - learn AJAX and MANUALLY examine every page to check if anything is transmitted without your knowledge #4 Again, manually examine any GET or POST form looking for hidden fields #5 Randomly change your IP (tor), referrer and user-agent (modify Firefox's extension?)
If you manage to solve issues #3 and #4, please post the solution - anonymously;) - for the benefit of mankind:)
PS. You might also want to consider configuring privoxy to block any 1x1 pixel gifs
An "old" iMac doesn't run OSX;) We are talking ancient technolgy here. As old as well.. my father! As for the solution - by now there are literally hundreds of freely available applications that can take care of the grey bits coming through your modem, for any imaginable hardware and software combination. Still, none of those solves a very simple problem: faxes are transferred slooowwwly. For a business, to receive 3 junk pages means 1-2 minutes of busy telephone line. This sucks. Storage, deletion, filtering of messages are in no way an issue, and btw thermic paper is very cheap. The fact that your very expensive and needed telephone line is busy costs a lot more.
If you go home to escape your day to day whatever life, please do consider changing that first. Building fences won't make you a happier person.
Re:The interfaces are [always] wanting
on
Linux Multimedia Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The answer to your question is not piracy, nor quality or commercial reasons. Yes, there are hundreds of terrabytes in.mp3 format available on P2P networks, but let's not assume everyone is out trying to steal something. The mpeg format doesn't offer any kind of copy protection, vorbis doesn't either. I strongly believe.mp3 is the most popular simply because #1 it is good enough #2 it is free (or at least this is what the entire planet thinks, although 2-3 lawyers might disagree) #3 it was there first
This eliminates any chance of growth to another "good enough" and "free" codec.
Still: A lot of my friends are converting right now the 192kbit.mp3s to 64kbit.oggs, but for a single reason: portable music players have limited disk space. By portable I mean cell phones and PDAs. This is a huge user base, and if I was the developer who conceived the.ogg compression algorithm I would try my best to deliver contents to those "niche" markets. Of course, I am not that developer and all I can do is envy him/her for a job well done.
Dan Bricklin is currently the CEO of an unknown company, trying to make a living by selling a 27-year old idea with the "collaborative" buzz-word attached.
Some fair amount of googling showed up no such documented (or even better - free as in speech) algorithms, can you please post some relevant examples? Sorry if this appears offtopic, I for one would be very interested in such reading..
Very good point you're making - although this is not what you were trying to say: 99% of the world's computing population may use Microsoft applications 1% of the time. Yet all of them must pay 100% of the price. Having a huge installed base really helps. A monopoly doesn't hurt either.
Little as I may know about the "black hat" community - at least this thing seems logical: the main target for virus / SPAM spreaders is "shitty 25kb/s upstream" users. They never check their boxes, are used to having poor connectivity, are also very hard to track, cannot be charged under any law and yet can spew out 100-1000 messages per day. Imagine having a list of some hundreds of such machines. You'd be unstoppable:)
This would be very useful for me: instead of instantly (no dialog screens to help me with the conversion) viewing a horribly wreck of what used to be my document in Word, why not grant the use the benefit of a doubt and ask: "Hmm, I can't do lists in a table cell, should I try to approximate what you meant or mark the badly imported text somehow".. "I also can't import equations, but maybe a simple jpeg of the already rendered text would do".. so on so forth. This goes for every other format, CSV, Lotus Notes, the long awaited Word Perfect etc. Please allow me to make some decisions, and maybe automatically submit bug reports based on actual data, crashdumps aren't very relevant.
Here we go.. Making the web browser an integral part of the user interface is a Bad Idea. Upgrading the browser now requires a painful KDE-level update with tens of apps crashing because of incompatibilities with QT3/4.
Even sadder, Linspire had a functional and open source product based on Gaim (Phonegaim) which was released in beta form for win32 and abandoned it for another with less features and closed source:(
I must have 10 bucks available on my CC, and am going to donate them NOW! SVG is the best thing on my list close to sliced bread, Dan Steinman's dynapi and Adobe's VRML impleentation a long time ago. Way cool, revolutionary thinking, the stuff geeks are made of. May the web become what it was meant to be 6 years ago!
For the life of me I can't understand the alien Solaris/Gnome naming convention (computer:///, start-here: etc). THREE slashes? What was wrong with just 'start'? And what was wrong with / and ~ ? To replace a one-letter convetion established for decades with fancy non-intuitive long options (what the heck is 'start-here' anyway) looks completely brain-dead to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately spammers are ahead of you. Here's what I get thousands of times daily: http://generatia9.info/razvan/dealing.gif .gif which includes some small "noise" bits. It would surely bypass your OCR software. Should you adapt to catch this, they will probably find something else. I'm not saying you won't hurt them should you succeed, but consider this: you design your OCR software to analyze every frame in an animated .gif, to catch the offending text. What if the spammer uses the simple sprite-based animation to move pieces of text around? You honestly don't stand a chance.
It's an animated
Of course, this is from my very limited experience with the gif format. Any suggestions on catching these are warmly welcome.
c:\>copy c:\win311 + c:\winnt35 + c:\progra~1\intern~1 + c:\progra~1\window~1 + c:\micros~1.net c:\vista ;) :p
would me more appropriate
Except copy doesn't have a recursive switch and xcopy can't do multiple sources
.. as a good marketing approach. Skip the 2.0 branch entirely. Don't release it to the public, don't even announce it. Work on 3.0, praise the new Gecko, get some (any) solution to the memory leaks. That's it.
So Apple allows Dell to sell custom-designed hardware and bundle Firefox with their OEM version of OS X?
I fail to se how you could run Fedora5 and Windows 2003 4 years ago, also - at that time - no matter what guest/host OS you had you ran WMVare 1.x server or were a very early adopter of 2.0 (July 2002). VMWare 1.x was far from a speedy or stable solution, so I can only salute you for creating such a stable setup.
Unfortunately, you are wrong. "eg" (exempli gratia) means "for example",but "ie" (id est - such is or idem quod - identical to) means "an exact example of the aforementioned situation/object/person/whatever".
I will personally disagree with your opinion. I have never been able to produce any quality results in exams (or at work, later) unless being under stress. Stress == adrenaline for me. Without it, I'm just the usual office slacker. Not caring about the outcome of a project is hardly an incentive to get it done, and get it right. With these in mind, an advice on how to keep a clear mind while trembling like a leaf in front of the examiners would be welcome. A (most likely stupid, and surely dangerous) solution for me and a lot of colleagues has been to take a light painkiller like Nurofen. No other bright ideas from me though.. just learned to live with the feeling.
May I suggest 'man hier'? It sure was helpful for all C:\ folks (including me) that bumped into the Unix way of arranging things.
Off-topic note: please relax on the "installs cookies" issue: it is a tracking method - yes. There are also other far more reliable methods which achieve the same purpose. Your only way of escaping tracking now is to
;) - for the benefit of mankind :)
#1 Block cookies (of course)
#2 Disable any form of scripting (easy)
#3 If that is not feasible - learn AJAX and MANUALLY examine every page to check if anything is transmitted without your knowledge
#4 Again, manually examine any GET or POST form looking for hidden fields
#5 Randomly change your IP (tor), referrer and user-agent (modify Firefox's extension?)
If you manage to solve issues #3 and #4, please post the solution - anonymously
PS. You might also want to consider configuring privoxy to block any 1x1 pixel gifs
Soo, if I hack some unsuspecting Chinese's machine and install some MTA on it, will the owner go to jail? Sweet.
An "old" iMac doesn't run OSX ;) We are talking ancient technolgy here. As old as well.. my father! As for the solution - by now there are literally hundreds of freely available applications that can take care of the grey bits coming through your modem, for any imaginable hardware and software combination. Still, none of those solves a very simple problem: faxes are transferred slooowwwly. For a business, to receive 3 junk pages means 1-2 minutes of busy telephone line. This sucks. Storage, deletion, filtering of messages are in no way an issue, and btw thermic paper is very cheap. The fact that your very expensive and needed telephone line is busy costs a lot more.
If you go home to escape your day to day whatever life, please do consider changing that first. Building fences won't make you a happier person.
The answer to your question is not piracy, nor quality or commercial reasons. Yes, there are hundreds of terrabytes in .mp3 format available on P2P networks, but let's not assume everyone is out trying to steal something. The mpeg format doesn't offer any kind of copy protection, vorbis doesn't either. I strongly believe .mp3 is the most popular simply because .mp3s to 64kbit .oggs, but for a single reason: portable music players have limited disk space. By portable I mean cell phones and PDAs. This is a huge user base, and if I was the developer who conceived the .ogg compression algorithm I would try my best to deliver contents to those "niche" markets. Of course, I am not that developer and all I can do is envy him/her for a job well done.
#1 it is good enough
#2 it is free (or at least this is what the entire planet thinks, although 2-3 lawyers might disagree)
#3 it was there first
This eliminates any chance of growth to another "good enough" and "free" codec.
Still: A lot of my friends are converting right now the 192kbit
Dan Bricklin is currently the CEO of an unknown company, trying to make a living by selling a 27-year old idea with the "collaborative" buzz-word attached.
Some fair amount of googling showed up no such documented (or even better - free as in speech) algorithms, can you please post some relevant examples?
Sorry if this appears offtopic, I for one would be very interested in such reading..
Very good point you're making - although this is not what you were trying to say: 99% of the world's computing population may use Microsoft applications 1% of the time. Yet all of them must pay 100% of the price. Having a huge installed base really helps. A monopoly doesn't hurt either.
Little as I may know about the "black hat" community - at least this thing seems logical: the main target for virus / SPAM spreaders is "shitty 25kb/s upstream" users. They never check their boxes, are used to having poor connectivity, are also very hard to track, cannot be charged under any law and yet can spew out 100-1000 messages per day. Imagine having a list of some hundreds of such machines. You'd be unstoppable :)
This would be very useful for me: instead of instantly (no dialog screens to help me with the conversion) viewing a horribly wreck of what used to be my document in Word, why not grant the use the benefit of a doubt and ask: "Hmm, I can't do lists in a table cell, should I try to approximate what you meant or mark the badly imported text somehow" .. "I also can't import equations, but maybe a simple jpeg of the already rendered text would do" .. so on so forth. This goes for every other format, CSV, Lotus Notes, the long awaited Word Perfect etc. Please allow me to make some decisions, and maybe automatically submit bug reports based on actual data, crashdumps aren't very relevant.
Here we go.. Making the web browser an integral part of the user interface is a Bad Idea. Upgrading the browser now requires a painful KDE-level update with tens of apps crashing because of incompatibilities with QT3/4.
Right-click on the "My Documents" icon, select "Encrypt this folder". Easy enough?
Even sadder, Linspire had a functional and open source product based on Gaim (Phonegaim) which was released in beta form for win32 and abandoned it for another with less features and closed source :(
I must have 10 bucks available on my CC, and am going to donate them NOW! SVG is the best thing on my list close to sliced bread, Dan Steinman's dynapi and Adobe's VRML impleentation a long time ago. Way cool, revolutionary thinking, the stuff geeks are made of. May the web become what it was meant to be 6 years ago!
For the life of me I can't understand the alien Solaris/Gnome naming convention (computer:///, start-here: etc). THREE slashes? What was wrong with just 'start'? And what was wrong with / and ~ ? To replace a one-letter convetion established for decades with fancy non-intuitive long options (what the heck is 'start-here' anyway) looks completely brain-dead to me.