good virus vs bad virus?
on
A Worm's Worm
·
· Score: 1
You know, just as those guys managed to figure a virus to fight HIV, MS shouldn't have announced the vulnerability but written a worm to fix the hole... then the world needn't know how much more vulnerable Windows can get... too bad the tech team there don't seem as great as their marketing team....
hmm. i've been recommending dreamweaver to everyone who's been thinking of using frontpage, but frankly, i still can't figure out how to fit it into my workflow. i use photoshop for all my graphics and output an initial html from it, and then i use vim on it to handcode the stuff that needs to be handcoded and make a template out of it should i need it as a template. stuff like fireworks still puzzle me, really.
(ah my designer-student-friend was trying to tell me how programmers can't see things their way, but sigh... mayhaps only those who hand-code can understand why hand-coding is the only true way haha)
Sum-mer dies a-gain
V-B has a new re-lease
Perl still works just fine
I've been feeling very strange about English Haiku for a long while... cos i think traditional Haiku, pays attention not just to the syllabus, but more importantly, to the elements of the season. ah well, maybe it's just me.
Why don't we just forget about making windows secure? Indulge me in my imagination -
IMHO, Windows made pretty bad choices as much as it earnestly strives to be a Network OS. I think the networking layer doesn't come up till pretty late in the bootup for one...
But anyway, if that's the case, since processors are getting more powerful, linux is our emblem for stability and security, and emulators are becoming so available, couldn't we just have a linux without GNOME nor KDE, but just run a fullscreen emulator on top of that and serve windows (or any OS) to the current logged in user?
In this way, we can run "baby" SCALED DOWN (yes, not bloated...) single-user OSs for users - and users get to customise their computing experience beyond choosing their favourite WM or desktop manager.
Yes, linux will become pretty invisible/invincible - but for most non un*x users out there, i think they don't really care what's running below.
Ah well, but that's just my imagination. but i think it'd be cool for instutitions to have such distros installed, then there wouldn't need to be "unix" labs different from "windows" labs. But I guess we need to wait for machines to be miraculously twice as powerful as software needs them to be for this to be less of an imagination.
I'd been wondering how I can, when developing (in-house) solutions in a company that doesn't care less how i do it, ensure that my code can be GPL'd and released - cos i recall advice to have the management sign themselves out of claiming undue ownership over the code. think i've just found my solution.
I think the asian market is a lot more varied than lets say the European market. Over here we have not just CJK, but also Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Burmese, 2 flavours of Malay... yes, right now I'm just eating hamburgers when it comes to OS', but I think the asians know better what the asians need out of their boxes... or rather, what they would like linux to look like right out of the box, perhaps.
Maybe this is taking it a bit far, but apart from Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese (Hyojungo aka Tokyo Japanese), there's a whole host of dialects which would need to be localised differently - word-groups (Ci2 Hui4 in Chinese) are dramatically different in these dialects and if you tried typing in these you should find it to be as painful as trying to type Chinese via a Japanese input-method.
AFAIK, people in Windows use special programs to aid Kansai-ben input. it'd be cool if even dialects can be built in.
And yes, let the asians decide for themselves how they would have solved their kanji problem.
actually it's not just in theory... PS7 does have a turn text to path function - only that it doesn't have a turn ALL text layers into paths function.. something which Illustrator does have.
fonts can be a big headache, especially if you design on a PC and your printers work on a Mac and your company isn't half as rich enough to buy all the established font packs out there. I always turn all my type (text) into outlines (paths) in illustrator to save my printer and myself.
and if i'm right, the partial embedding of font vector data (eg, for just the text that's been used) is allowed, but the wholesale embedding of certain fonts in not allowed.
just on the side - has there been any legal cases surrounding the intellectual ownership of fonts? some people seem to be pretty liberal when packing fonts with artwork.
does anyone out there do GPL'ed opentype and truetype fonts? i'd love to own the whole pack!
Hmm i thought i tried that... but i still can't do my alt-t-b-g to bring out the gaussian blur filter... i think i'd need to press the menu access key and thre right-arrow a dozen times before i can get to my item?
ok i admit this is a strange habit, but when factory settings don't exist for certain options i often use, i prefer to get used to the windows keyboard sequence just to be sure i don't get too crippled on another computer...
GTK doesn't have this problem, yes? no?
(8)Tab ain't the most useful thing in PS/Illustrator to me though. it's F7(layer palette toggle), F5(symbol-cum-colourswatch palette), F5(brushes) and the like that bring out specific palettes that allow me to make optimum use of my desktop space... wonder if Gimp now has them?
technically this sounds really absurdly "shallow" but, being able to magically make specific palettes i need appear is a major reason why i like PS.
hmm... used to see plastic S$50 bills around here but somehow they quit it. no idea why.
anyway, if PS detects banknote-like features, would that mean that we can't use it to create "safer" vouchers and coupons that are tougher to xerox? or maybe there will be a PhotoshopPro?:P
Before i had actually switched to photoshop proper, i used to use some gimp and some psp and some his and some that.. but several things make me wish that photoshop were open source and available on linux and i have to think thrice abt switching back - cos i luv photoshop for these:
(1)factory preset shortcut keys: these make sure I can be productive on just anybody's computer - esp useful when i have to fix someone else's artwork, though sad to say, i prefer to work on a PC 'cos Mac has its menu bar out of reach of the keyboard (2)more shortcut keys like space bar (temp switch to the "hand" tool), multiple ways to zooom in/out without needing to click on the zoom tool etc (3)filters,(quick)masks,paths(PS7),curves/levels,L AB/CMYK/RGB/Multichannel yes channels and yes LAB (4)gamut alert this colour can't be represented in CMYK (5)pantone colours? (6)argh can't remember offhand (8)oh yes did i mention shortcut keys? the ones that pop up my palettes (methinks freehand sucks at this) only when i want them? oh yes and the ones that make me forget that people actually use the tool palette:P (9)ah fullscreen mode always makes me like a pro:PP
yeah but i do have lotsa complaints too - (1)photoshop's a bit too dummy at times. where're all the DIP tools like 2D FFT and convolution matrix? (2)text on path. does Adobe not do this in PS so that they can sell you Illustrator as well? (3)Text - can't they store vector data as well so that on comps without those fonts i can still safely resize based on vector data? (4)sharks i can't nest layer groups (5)shit that drop shadow and inner glow effect i used on my layour didn't scale automatically when i resized that layer just now. (6)crap i need a 2-colour artwork that separates easily for my printer. gotta do it in illustrator again (7)the colour prints weird. oh no wonder it's CMYK artwork, gotta print it in Illustrator or Pagemaker. (8)can't i resize my canvas and not get my bitmap layers cropped??
ah well. sometimes i also wonder if Photoshop secretly aspires to be Illustrator. But that's a different thread altogether. i'm on PS7 btw. and ya, to add on to the other thread i read, there's colour profile, monitor calibration and PPD's too - but thankfully half of those are my printer's worries.
methinks the 3-panel NeXT thing is cool - it lets you see the files you have on your folder while reminding you the path you have tracked down.. that's pretty close to being able to do "cd.." in GUI... okay, GUI aside,
would a pipe open in a file selector be a good idea? when i need to paste the current system time into vim, i would just do a:r! date, and it'd be cool if you could read stuff like "|tar xvfzO mails.tar.gz rejectmail.txt"... or will the selector somehow step into tgzs? it'd be irritating to be trying to open a file and realize oops i gzipped it letme go back to my good old shell and gunzip it first.
ok maybe i'm getting something wrong - well i never coded with GTK:P
my colleague came over with a one-page document and asked me once, how he should email the page over to my coy's branch office. he asked me how he should scan it and paste it into and email or if there was some software that could convert it into a Word document. i looked at him for a while, and told him simply to fax it. he looked back at me, enlightened.
so sad that sometimes the box setting on our desks is so constraining the way we think - when a lot of problems could be solved outside the box. and even sadder if some managers and (system) analysts don't quite see this.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, just as those guys managed to figure a virus to fight HIV, MS shouldn't have announced the vulnerability but written a worm to fix the hole... then the world needn't know how much more vulnerable Windows can get... too bad the tech team there don't seem as great as their marketing team....
hmm. i've been recommending dreamweaver to everyone who's been thinking of using frontpage, but frankly, i still can't figure out how to fit it into my workflow. i use photoshop for all my graphics and output an initial html from it, and then i use vim on it to handcode the stuff that needs to be handcoded and make a template out of it should i need it as a template. stuff like fireworks still puzzle me, really.
(ah my designer-student-friend was trying to tell me how programmers can't see things their way, but sigh... mayhaps only those who hand-code can understand why hand-coding is the only true way haha)
V-B has a new re-lease
Perl still works just fine
I've been feeling very strange about English Haiku for a long while... cos i think traditional Haiku, pays attention not just to the syllabus, but more importantly, to the elements of the season. ah well, maybe it's just me.
Now, maybe SCO ppl should go work at Playboy for a while and learn how to sue people...
Why don't we just forget about making windows secure? Indulge me in my imagination -
IMHO, Windows made pretty bad choices as much as it earnestly strives to be a Network OS. I think the networking layer doesn't come up till pretty late in the bootup for one...
But anyway, if that's the case, since processors are getting more powerful, linux is our emblem for stability and security, and emulators are becoming so available, couldn't we just have a linux without GNOME nor KDE, but just run a fullscreen emulator on top of that and serve windows (or any OS) to the current logged in user?
In this way, we can run "baby" SCALED DOWN (yes, not bloated...) single-user OSs for users - and users get to customise their computing experience beyond choosing their favourite WM or desktop manager.
Yes, linux will become pretty invisible/invincible - but for most non un*x users out there, i think they don't really care what's running below.
Ah well, but that's just my imagination. but i think it'd be cool for instutitions to have such distros installed, then there wouldn't need to be "unix" labs different from "windows" labs. But I guess we need to wait for machines to be miraculously twice as powerful as software needs them to be for this to be less of an imagination.
they probby need to uuencode it too... or they'll have a bit of problem trying to read binary data.
24h39m? can someone tell me what the date is on Mars?
I'd been wondering how I can, when developing (in-house) solutions in a company that doesn't care less how i do it, ensure that my code can be GPL'd and released - cos i recall advice to have the management sign themselves out of claiming undue ownership over the code. think i've just found my solution.
I think the asian market is a lot more varied than lets say the European market. Over here we have not just CJK, but also Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Burmese, 2 flavours of Malay... yes, right now I'm just eating hamburgers when it comes to OS', but I think the asians know better what the asians need out of their boxes... or rather, what they would like linux to look like right out of the box, perhaps.
Maybe this is taking it a bit far, but apart from Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese (Hyojungo aka Tokyo Japanese), there's a whole host of dialects which would need to be localised differently - word-groups (Ci2 Hui4 in Chinese) are dramatically different in these dialects and if you tried typing in these you should find it to be as painful as trying to type Chinese via a Japanese input-method.
AFAIK, people in Windows use special programs to aid Kansai-ben input. it'd be cool if even dialects can be built in.
And yes, let the asians decide for themselves how they would have solved their kanji problem.
actually it's not just in theory... PS7 does have a turn text to path function - only that it doesn't have a turn ALL text layers into paths function.. something which Illustrator does have.
fonts can be a big headache, especially if you design on a PC and your printers work on a Mac and your company isn't half as rich enough to buy all the established font packs out there. I always turn all my type (text) into outlines (paths) in illustrator to save my printer and myself.
and if i'm right, the partial embedding of font vector data (eg, for just the text that's been used) is allowed, but the wholesale embedding of certain fonts in not allowed.
just on the side - has there been any legal cases surrounding the intellectual ownership of fonts? some people seem to be pretty liberal when packing fonts with artwork.
does anyone out there do GPL'ed opentype and truetype fonts? i'd love to own the whole pack!
Hmm i thought i tried that... but i still can't do my alt-t-b-g to bring out the gaussian blur filter... i think i'd need to press the menu access key and thre right-arrow a dozen times before i can get to my item? ok i admit this is a strange habit, but when factory settings don't exist for certain options i often use, i prefer to get used to the windows keyboard sequence just to be sure i don't get too crippled on another computer... GTK doesn't have this problem, yes? no?
(8)Tab ain't the most useful thing in PS/Illustrator to me though. it's F7(layer palette toggle), F5(symbol-cum-colourswatch palette), F5(brushes) and the like that bring out specific palettes that allow me to make optimum use of my desktop space... wonder if Gimp now has them?
technically this sounds really absurdly "shallow" but, being able to magically make specific palettes i need appear is a major reason why i like PS.
hmm... used to see plastic S$50 bills around here but somehow they quit it. no idea why.
:P
anyway, if PS detects banknote-like features, would that mean that we can't use it to create "safer" vouchers and coupons that are tougher to xerox? or maybe there will be a PhotoshopPro?
Before i had actually switched to photoshop proper, i used to use some gimp and some psp and some his and some that.. but several things make me wish that photoshop were open source and available on linux and i have to think thrice abt switching back - cos i luv photoshop for these:
L AB/CMYK/RGB/Multichannel yes channels and yes LAB (4)gamut alert this colour can't be represented in CMYK (5)pantone colours? (6)argh can't remember offhand (8)oh yes did i mention shortcut keys? the ones that pop up my palettes (methinks freehand sucks at this) only when i want them? oh yes and the ones that make me forget that people actually use the tool palette :P (9)ah fullscreen mode always makes me like a pro :PP
(1)factory preset shortcut keys: these make sure I can be productive on just anybody's computer - esp useful when i have to fix someone else's artwork, though sad to say, i prefer to work on a PC 'cos Mac has its menu bar out of reach of the keyboard (2)more shortcut keys like space bar (temp switch to the "hand" tool), multiple ways to zooom in/out without needing to click on the zoom tool etc (3)filters,(quick)masks,paths(PS7),curves/levels,
yeah but i do have lotsa complaints too - (1)photoshop's a bit too dummy at times. where're all the DIP tools like 2D FFT and convolution matrix? (2)text on path. does Adobe not do this in PS so that they can sell you Illustrator as well? (3)Text - can't they store vector data as well so that on comps without those fonts i can still safely resize based on vector data? (4)sharks i can't nest layer groups (5)shit that drop shadow and inner glow effect i used on my layour didn't scale automatically when i resized that layer just now. (6)crap i need a 2-colour artwork that separates easily for my printer. gotta do it in illustrator again (7)the colour prints weird. oh no wonder it's CMYK artwork, gotta print it in Illustrator or Pagemaker. (8)can't i resize my canvas and not get my bitmap layers cropped??
ah well. sometimes i also wonder if Photoshop secretly aspires to be Illustrator. But that's a different thread altogether. i'm on PS7 btw. and ya, to add on to the other thread i read, there's colour profile, monitor calibration and PPD's too - but thankfully half of those are my printer's worries.
methinks the 3-panel NeXT thing is cool - it lets you see the files you have on your folder while reminding you the path you have tracked down.. that's pretty close to being able to do "cd .." in GUI... okay, GUI aside,
would a pipe open in a file selector be a good idea? when i need to paste the current system time into vim, i would just do a :r! date, and it'd be cool if you could read stuff like "|tar xvfzO mails.tar.gz rejectmail.txt"... or will the selector somehow step into tgzs? it'd be irritating to be trying to open a file and realize oops i gzipped it letme go back to my good old shell and gunzip it first.
ok maybe i'm getting something wrong - well i never coded with GTK :P
I just absolutely had to post this.
my colleague came over with a one-page document and asked me once, how he should email the page over to my coy's branch office. he asked me how he should scan it and paste it into and email or if there was some software that could convert it into a Word document. i looked at him for a while, and told him simply to fax it. he looked back at me, enlightened.
so sad that sometimes the box setting on our desks is so constraining the way we think - when a lot of problems could be solved outside the box. and even sadder if some managers and (system) analysts don't quite see this.