Cameras also usually have filters over the lens to block out infra-red. IR sources are common enough that unless you _want_ to see it, you almost certainly _want_ to block it.
I skimmed TFA and didn't see any mention, but unless these cameras depend on IR to function, putting IR LEDs around your plate won't do much.
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is they provide the source, and [...]
then other people compile the binaries for you. Not hard at all to find or use, and it works very well. When compiled with MinGW you don't even need to bother with Cygwin's libraries.
I've also used Scite for AutoIt and it does work very well, but in general Scite is a royal PITA to configure. If you want to change text styles or colors you have to wade through several mountains of configuration files, hunting for just the right line to change, restart the editor and hope you picked the right place to edit.
For Windows users, Notepad++ is a much better solution. It uses the Scintilla editor engine so it has the same capabilities as Scite, but the configuration is all done through a GUI editor. This makes configuring syntax highlighting and styles much easier and less time consuming.
Europeans are paying $9 US or more per gallon of gas and although they don't like it, they manage. What happens to the US economy when gas doubles again? You're having trouble at $4/gallon.
This is such a popular thing to throw around, especially when US gas prices rise, but it's a completely bogus argument.
The only reason Europeans pay $9 a gallon of gas because their government taxes it to that point [1]. In the UK, there is a road duty tax of almost GBP£ 2 on each US gallon. Additionally there is a VAT tax of about GBP£ 1.2 for each US gallon. That works out to be around a $6 USD tax on every gallon of gas sold in the UK. Percentage wise, this tax is greater than 100%.
$9 - $6 = around $3/gallon. Europeans pay so much because they allow their government to financially restrict fuel consumption. This might work in most Europe, but as others have pointed out, it's not feasible in significant parts of the US. If you're tired of paying this ridiculous tax, do something about it, or don't. In either case, stop playing the martyr; it's getting old.
Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot? Just sayin'...
If you're going to troll, it might be a good idea RTFA beforehand so that you don't make a fool of yourself. Two examples:
- The web service is implemented in Python and currently deployed on two virtual machines at Amazon EC2. - Like Asirra, we implemented Inkblot in Python.
If they're astroturfing they aren't very good at it.
The article has very little Microsoft-specific details in it. It's basically a short explanation of high-performance content delivery and a few stories about MS Research (link because they have some cool stuff) projects and how they fared with high load traffic surging (aka Slashdotting). They specifically mention getting Slashdotted several times, as well as surviving a DDoS.
Overall I thought it was an interesting article. I didn't realize Amazon's S3 service was so inexpensive or available to "budget" sites.
It seems to insist on applying such aggressive hinting to the fonts that they show up far too spindly and with distorted shapes....does anyone know how to do this on Windows?
I highly recommend the ClearType Tuner. There's a web version, but the control panel applet is nicer I think because changes are immediately shown.
I don't care for ClearType when on normal strength, but after fiddling with that tool I prefer it over having ClearType off. If you do use ClearType, you should also grab Consolas, a great monospaced font designed explicitly for ClearType.
I don't recall who said it, but a quote similar to this, by one of our founding fathers, is appropriate:
The republic will last as long as the people refuse to vote themselves the treasury.
(I believe that was Ben Franklin.)
I don't know if Ben Franklin said that, but I do know of a very similar quote that is usually attributed to Alexander Tytler:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
There is a significant amount of truth there I think. I can't help but see most of the "free world" appears to be around the complacency to apathy stage (or past it in some cases). Think how often you hear people say that "things are fine like they are" and "I don't really care who is elected".
Call me an elitist jerk all you want, but I think you should have to be a property owner to vote.
While what you're saying probably comes across as a step (or several) in the wrong direction to many people (it is very politically incorrect after all), I understand where you're coming from. It kind of reminds me of the political system at work in Heinlein's Starship Troopers. From that link:
...in the Terran Federation, the rights of a full Citizen (to vote, and hold public office) must be earned through voluntary Federal service. However, the franchise cannot be exercised until after honorable discharge from the Service, which means that active members of the Service cannot vote. Those residents who opt not to perform Federal Service retain the other rights generally associated with a modern democracy (e.g. free speech, assembly, etc.), but cannot vote or hold public office. This structure arose ad hoc after the collapse of the 20th century Western democracies, brought on by both social failures at home and military defeat by the Chinese Hegemony overseas (i.e. looking forward into the late 20th century from the time the novel was written in the late 1950s).
I don't know how well it would work in our situation, even just considering the difference in scale, but I do find it interesting. I admit I wish we had a system where people who have no idea what the issues are or what candidates (supposedly) claim to support don't vote, but finding and perfecting such a system would be impossible I think. We're doomed to have our future chosen largely based on the candidate that's thrown the most buzzwords around and has the worst^H^H^H^H^Hbest MySpace page.
(Oh, and has the strongest lobbyists. You want to seriously try and fix the system? Start with getting rid of them.)
Isn't this old news? I mean, it's been covered on Slashdot at least twicenow. (Dear timothy, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Google.)
Yes, the formats are large and complicated, but for a variety of good, if antiquated, reasons. I'd suggest anyone interested read Joel Spolsky's blog post on it (which, being posted last February, isn't news either but hey, this is Slashdot).
Honestly, most of what bothers me are UI changes that didn't need to be made and in any case make the UI worse, not better.
That said, the only feature removed that comes to mind immediately is the File Types association dialog box from the Folder Options control panel / dialog. In every version of Windows you've been able to add/change file verbs and actions as well as do things like change the icon, description, etc. This gave you a very fine level of control and it was great for those who wanted/needed to use it. In Vista that dialog/tab was nuked and replaced with some vanilla "what program do you want to open this file with" crap.
There are more that I can't recall offhand, but that's probably the biggest. Personally, I think it almost comes across as an insult to Windows administrators that they'd just go off and remove something like that.
There's something on the wing!
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If one looks at pictures of airline flights from the 1960s, you will see well-dressed passengers enjoying their flight.
In any case, some of it is probably just a reaction to more modern events and mindsets. Nowadays, instead of "Oh, it's a distraught passenger who doesn't like flying" it's "OMGTERRORIST". Airlines overbooking flights and employing shoddy baggage handling techniques doesn't help anything either.
Oh, wait. The term "slashdotted" has become ubiquitous with smashing a webserver due to high traffic. Most webservers are *nix based (though admittedly IIS is gaining ground). Hm. Nevermind.
I think the surprise here is that MS is using same core that's in their very shaky Vista software to run their server software.
I realize it's great fun to aimlessly bash Vista around here but I wasn't aware that the NT kernel was generally considered "shaky". In fact, I didn't even think that Vista was widely considered shaky. Bloated? Maybe. Resource intensive? Possibly. Some stupid UI decisions? Most certainly.
I'm (begrudgingly) running Vista at home (since I have to support it at work) and I haven't had any stability problems. I do curse the UI team for removing features I deem necessary and adding meaningless clutter, but I haven't seen any crashes or stability issues.
My point, since you seemed to completely miss it, was that unless all the corrupt career politicians and lobbyists are removed from power, nothing will ever change. I don't care who is elected president, things will not change. Saying anything else is just a cute tagline.
Perhaps that slogan only really means that we can hope all we want for some change, 'cause we're never going to get it.
The only way the United States is going to see any real change for the better is if a bomb dropped on Washington DC during a State of the Union address.
Anymore I'm not sure it would be such a bad thing to have happen.
Speaking of Paul, is it safe to assume that he was the one Republican that voted against the bill?
Of course it's not. As with all politicians, their number 1 priority is watching out for themselves.
The sole Republican (aka the only one with balls) was Timothy Johnson (IL). Ron Paul (and our local hero, moron Chris Cannon from UT) abstained from voting at all. Considering that it's their job to read up on and vote on laws, and that's what we pay them for it would be nice if they actually did it.
That said, considering that Congress isn't even required to read a law before voting, what the hell's the point? We'd probably be better off right now if the treasonous bunch just voted randomly on every bill that comes through.
Thats what they get for buying it instead of pirating it. The cracked version(s) don't have any problems like this.
I think it's worth pointing out that the two methods (purchasing and cracking) aren't mutually exclusive. When a company adopts draconian (or just plain stupid) licensing tactics, you can still purchase the software (for legal, moral, etc reasons) and then proceed to download a crack for your copy or just a cracked one via "the usual places". It's not ideal and not perfect, but at least you can run the software you paid for.
At my last job we had some software that required a hardware dongle attached to a license server. The problem was that the licensing software used some hacked-up bastardized version of NetBIOS which meant that only clients on the same subnet as the server could connect and authorize themselves. After weeks of haggling with the company and them refusing to fix their crappy licensing software ("It works for everyone else!") we just found a license crack online and applied it to all the client workstations.
Were we legal enough to survive an audit? I have no idea, but we we were fully licensed for all the clients connected and I think that's what mattered.
A Google search for 'site:alex.kozinski.com' shows a lot of links to pages on that domain. It's possible one of them was for this "personal storage location", but I doubt anyone will find anything via Google/Wayback. That said, Google does have a tendency to dig up "hidden" stuff, so who knows.
I'm not sure if you're under the impression that the idea of terrorism is fantasy or if you're just trolling for Insightful mods by discounting terrorism as a real means to an end. Based on the fact that you haven't backed up anything you've said, I'm forced to guess the latter.
According Wikipedia (so it's official you see), "terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political or ideological goals". Based on this, I would surmise that if the guy did as he said, whether he's a terrorist or not depends on why he's doing it. If it's because he's a psycho nutjob who kills for kicks then I'd say no. If he's protesting some government action, trying to get the government to change it's policies, or doing it in the name of religion then I'd say he probably falls under "terrorist".
The whole point of terrorism is (as the name obviously suggests) to utilize fear and terror to achieve your goals. Indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians is a pretty good way to spread terror.
few are suggesting OS X is not ready for the desktop
While I wouldn't say that OSX isn't ready for the desktop, I would say it might not be ready for the corporate desktop.
One of the places Microsoft has put a lot of effort is into large-scale enterprise systems management. Features of Windows like Active Directory, Group Policy, WSUS, etc are what corporate clients really care about. They want to be able to easily and centrally manage users, permissions, operating system updates, and software restrictions. Unless/until there are tools that allow you to do these kinds of things with OSX and Linux, I think you'll see some hesitation on the part of large corporations.
I know you can do some of this stuff for Linux (user management with LDAP, customized package repos, etc) but I don't know about OSX. I do know however that there is a big difference between "ready for the desktop" and "ready for the corporate desktop".
I think I can speak for everyone when I say that nobody who values their time RTFA, after all it's just superfluous details that aren't needed to post comments. In fact, based on a lot of the comments I read, I assume that many people are so busy they cannot even RTFS. This too is understandable to some extent since the summary is just a wordy version of the article title. This is, however, the first time I've met somebody who couldn't bother to RTFT.
Slashdot Mirror
Cameras see IR, eyes don't.
Cameras also usually have filters over the lens to block out infra-red. IR sources are common enough that unless you _want_ to see it, you almost certainly _want_ to block it.
I skimmed TFA and didn't see any mention, but unless these cameras depend on IR to function, putting IR LEDs around your plate won't do much.
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is they provide the source, and [...]
then other people compile the binaries for you. Not hard at all to find or use, and it works very well. When compiled with MinGW you don't even need to bother with Cygwin's libraries.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ffmpeg+windows
SCiTE
I've also used Scite for AutoIt and it does work very well, but in general Scite is a royal PITA to configure. If you want to change text styles or colors you have to wade through several mountains of configuration files, hunting for just the right line to change, restart the editor and hope you picked the right place to edit.
For Windows users, Notepad++ is a much better solution. It uses the Scintilla editor engine so it has the same capabilities as Scite, but the configuration is all done through a GUI editor. This makes configuring syntax highlighting and styles much easier and less time consuming.
Haha.
I swear, if I ever work at Intel I'll be digging up the PaintShop Pro file for the Intel poster I made a while back and printing it full size.
Although I imagine it's something of a sore subject, so maybe not a good idea :)
Europeans are paying $9 US or more per gallon of gas and although they don't like it, they manage. What happens to the US economy when gas doubles again? You're having trouble at $4/gallon.
This is such a popular thing to throw around, especially when US gas prices rise, but it's a completely bogus argument.
The only reason Europeans pay $9 a gallon of gas because their government taxes it to that point [1]. In the UK, there is a road duty tax of almost GBP£ 2 on each US gallon. Additionally there is a VAT tax of about GBP£ 1.2 for each US gallon. That works out to be around a $6 USD tax on every gallon of gas sold in the UK. Percentage wise, this tax is greater than 100%.
$9 - $6 = around $3/gallon. Europeans pay so much because they allow their government to financially restrict fuel consumption. This might work in most Europe, but as others have pointed out, it's not feasible in significant parts of the US. If you're tired of paying this ridiculous tax, do something about it, or don't. In either case, stop playing the martyr; it's getting old.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#United_Kingdom
Doesn't Microsoft employ "bloggers" to seed pro MS babble to Web sites like Slashdot? Just sayin'...
If you're going to troll, it might be a good idea RTFA beforehand so that you don't make a fool of yourself. Two examples:
- The web service is implemented in Python and currently deployed on two virtual machines at Amazon EC2.
- Like Asirra, we implemented Inkblot in Python.
If they're astroturfing they aren't very good at it.
The article has very little Microsoft-specific details in it. It's basically a short explanation of high-performance content delivery and a few stories about MS Research (link because they have some cool stuff) projects and how they fared with high load traffic surging (aka Slashdotting). They specifically mention getting Slashdotted several times, as well as surviving a DDoS.
Overall I thought it was an interesting article. I didn't realize Amazon's S3 service was so inexpensive or available to "budget" sites.
It seems to insist on applying such aggressive hinting to the fonts that they show up far too spindly and with distorted shapes. ...does anyone know how to do this on Windows?
I highly recommend the ClearType Tuner. There's a web version, but the control panel applet is nicer I think because changes are immediately shown.
I don't care for ClearType when on normal strength, but after fiddling with that tool I prefer it over having ClearType off. If you do use ClearType, you should also grab Consolas, a great monospaced font designed explicitly for ClearType.
I don't recall who said it, but a quote similar to this, by one of our founding fathers, is appropriate:
The republic will last as long as the people refuse to vote themselves the treasury.
(I believe that was Ben Franklin.)
I don't know if Ben Franklin said that, but I do know of a very similar quote that is usually attributed to Alexander Tytler:
There is a significant amount of truth there I think. I can't help but see most of the "free world" appears to be around the complacency to apathy stage (or past it in some cases). Think how often you hear people say that "things are fine like they are" and "I don't really care who is elected".
It's (more or less) good while it lasts I guess.
Call me an elitist jerk all you want, but I think you should have to be a property owner to vote.
While what you're saying probably comes across as a step (or several) in the wrong direction to many people (it is very politically incorrect after all), I understand where you're coming from. It kind of reminds me of the political system at work in Heinlein's Starship Troopers. From that link:
I don't know how well it would work in our situation, even just considering the difference in scale, but I do find it interesting. I admit I wish we had a system where people who have no idea what the issues are or what candidates (supposedly) claim to support don't vote, but finding and perfecting such a system would be impossible I think. We're doomed to have our future chosen largely based on the candidate that's thrown the most buzzwords around and has the worst^H^H^H^H^Hbest MySpace page.
(Oh, and has the strongest lobbyists. You want to seriously try and fix the system? Start with getting rid of them.)
Isn't this old news? I mean, it's been covered on Slashdot at least twice now. (Dear timothy, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Google.)
Yes, the formats are large and complicated, but for a variety of good, if antiquated, reasons. I'd suggest anyone interested read Joel Spolsky's blog post on it (which, being posted last February, isn't news either but hey, this is Slashdot).
What was removed ?
Honestly, most of what bothers me are UI changes that didn't need to be made and in any case make the UI worse, not better.
That said, the only feature removed that comes to mind immediately is the File Types association dialog box from the Folder Options control panel / dialog. In every version of Windows you've been able to add/change file verbs and actions as well as do things like change the icon, description, etc. This gave you a very fine level of control and it was great for those who wanted/needed to use it. In Vista that dialog/tab was nuked and replaced with some vanilla "what program do you want to open this file with" crap.
There are more that I can't recall offhand, but that's probably the biggest. Personally, I think it almost comes across as an insult to Windows administrators that they'd just go off and remove something like that.
If one looks at pictures of airline flights from the 1960s, you will see well-dressed passengers enjoying their flight.
I beg to differ!.
In any case, some of it is probably just a reaction to more modern events and mindsets. Nowadays, instead of "Oh, it's a distraught passenger who doesn't like flying" it's "OMGTERRORIST". Airlines overbooking flights and employing shoddy baggage handling techniques doesn't help anything either.
Lools IIS can't hold its own
Haha! That's funny and insightful!
Oh, wait.
The term "slashdotted" has become ubiquitous with smashing a webserver due to high traffic.
Most webservers are *nix based (though admittedly IIS is gaining ground).
Hm. Nevermind.
I think the surprise here is that MS is using same core that's in their very shaky Vista software to run their server software.
I realize it's great fun to aimlessly bash Vista around here but I wasn't aware that the NT kernel was generally considered "shaky". In fact, I didn't even think that Vista was widely considered shaky. Bloated? Maybe. Resource intensive? Possibly. Some stupid UI decisions? Most certainly.
I'm (begrudgingly) running Vista at home (since I have to support it at work) and I haven't had any stability problems. I do curse the UI team for removing features I deem necessary and adding meaningless clutter, but I haven't seen any crashes or stability issues.
I got to test Server 2008 before it was released to the public. All our internal applications identified 2008 as "Vista".
I have no idea why this is modded Informative.
Vista uses the NT kernel, version 6.0, build 6000. SP1 puts it up to 6001.
Server 2008 uses the NT kernel, version 6.0, build 6001.
Is it any surprise that software build prior to Server 2008 being released see it as Vista?
In related news, both Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 report being Linux v2.6.
A terrorist attack
I never said a terrorist attack.
My point, since you seemed to completely miss it, was that unless all the corrupt career politicians and lobbyists are removed from power, nothing will ever change. I don't care who is elected president, things will not change. Saying anything else is just a cute tagline.
Perhaps that slogan only really means that we can hope all we want for some change, 'cause we're never going to get it.
The only way the United States is going to see any real change for the better is if a bomb dropped on Washington DC during a State of the Union address.
Anymore I'm not sure it would be such a bad thing to have happen.
Speaking of Paul, is it safe to assume that he was the one Republican that voted against the bill?
Of course it's not. As with all politicians, their number 1 priority is watching out for themselves.
The sole Republican (aka the only one with balls) was Timothy Johnson (IL). Ron Paul (and our local hero, moron Chris Cannon from UT) abstained from voting at all. Considering that it's their job to read up on and vote on laws, and that's what we pay them for it would be nice if they actually did it.
That said, considering that Congress isn't even required to read a law before voting, what the hell's the point? We'd probably be better off right now if the treasonous bunch just voted randomly on every bill that comes through.
Thats what they get for buying it instead of pirating it. The cracked version(s) don't have any problems like this.
I think it's worth pointing out that the two methods (purchasing and cracking) aren't mutually exclusive. When a company adopts draconian (or just plain stupid) licensing tactics, you can still purchase the software (for legal, moral, etc reasons) and then proceed to download a crack for your copy or just a cracked one via "the usual places". It's not ideal and not perfect, but at least you can run the software you paid for.
At my last job we had some software that required a hardware dongle attached to a license server. The problem was that the licensing software used some hacked-up bastardized version of NetBIOS which meant that only clients on the same subnet as the server could connect and authorize themselves. After weeks of haggling with the company and them refusing to fix their crappy licensing software ("It works for everyone else!") we just found a license crack online and applied it to all the client workstations.
Were we legal enough to survive an audit? I have no idea, but we we were fully licensed for all the clients connected and I think that's what mattered.
The Wayback Machine might hold some interest here, if you can finagle it into giving you what you want.
For example, this URL looks potentially interesting (and scary for that matter): http://web.archive.org/web/20060621092124/http://alex.kozinski.com/underneathmyrobe/ but there isn't much there (at least that works).
A Google search for 'site:alex.kozinski.com' shows a lot of links to pages on that domain. It's possible one of them was for this "personal storage location", but I doubt anyone will find anything via Google/Wayback. That said, Google does have a tendency to dig up "hidden" stuff, so who knows.
You believe that don't you?
This is why the US is fucked up.
I'm not sure if you're under the impression that the idea of terrorism is fantasy or if you're just trolling for Insightful mods by discounting terrorism as a real means to an end. Based on the fact that you haven't backed up anything you've said, I'm forced to guess the latter.
According Wikipedia (so it's official you see), "terrorism is a term used to describe violence or other harmful acts committed (or threatened) against civilians by groups or persons for political or ideological goals". Based on this, I would surmise that if the guy did as he said, whether he's a terrorist or not depends on why he's doing it. If it's because he's a psycho nutjob who kills for kicks then I'd say no. If he's protesting some government action, trying to get the government to change it's policies, or doing it in the name of religion then I'd say he probably falls under "terrorist".
The whole point of terrorism is (as the name obviously suggests) to utilize fear and terror to achieve your goals. Indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians is a pretty good way to spread terror.
few are suggesting OS X is not ready for the desktop
While I wouldn't say that OSX isn't ready for the desktop, I would say it might not be ready for the corporate desktop.
One of the places Microsoft has put a lot of effort is into large-scale enterprise systems management. Features of Windows like Active Directory, Group Policy, WSUS, etc are what corporate clients really care about. They want to be able to easily and centrally manage users, permissions, operating system updates, and software restrictions. Unless/until there are tools that allow you to do these kinds of things with OSX and Linux, I think you'll see some hesitation on the part of large corporations.
I know you can do some of this stuff for Linux (user management with LDAP, customized package repos, etc) but I don't know about OSX. I do know however that there is a big difference between "ready for the desktop" and "ready for the corporate desktop".
If only the article contained this information...
I think I can speak for everyone when I say that nobody who values their time RTFA, after all it's just superfluous details that aren't needed to post comments. In fact, based on a lot of the comments I read, I assume that many people are so busy they cannot even RTFS. This too is understandable to some extent since the summary is just a wordy version of the article title. This is, however, the first time I've met somebody who couldn't bother to RTFT.
Short version: RTFT.
A lot of intelligent people believe that humanity + earth is a lost cause.
Then they ought to off themselves now, or use their time machine to change history and save us all.
What's that, no time machine? Then they probably should shut their mouths and stop contributing to global warming.
More like "Hey presto, it becomes an OLE client of SHVDOCW.DLL.
WTF is this!? Keep your facts outta here boy. We don't take too kindly to them round these parts.
And I thought they got rid of that integration with Vista and just made URLs in explorer open up IE instead
Entering a URL in Explorer under Vista does in fact open a new instance (or new tab) of IE leaving the Explorer instance unchanged.